“Perfect for fans of Game of Thrones” is overused and often wrong. And yet, I have to go and say it, this series is perfect for fans of Game of Thrones if you like:

• A well developed medieval-ish inspired world
• A large cast with interesting characters, some you love, some you’d love to see dead 
• A reasonably low magic setting, with some powerful and scary exceptions (and also some very mundane ones)
• Different countries with different cultures
• Boats and travelling
• Lots of military stuff
• Seeing a young cast grow up and struggle with some of the same choices they blamed their elders for
• The harsh realities of war 
• People dying quite a lot
• Finished series 

I will say the way it tackles these points is often very different, but in a lot of ways it’s the only series I’ve read that does compare.

[rant] The first book came out a year before The Name of the Wind, at the same publisher, DAW. I really hope someone somewhere is kicking themselves for not spending some of those marketing dollars on a series that was released on a yearly basis, and completed 2 years before The Wise Man’s Fear came out. As far as I can tell there aren’t even audiobooks for it! Even buying the ebooks (library didn’t have them) was a hassle because the US/non-US editions seem to be a mess. [/rant] 

It turns out 2022 is my year of unintentionally binging series and having them take over my entire life for weeks. Inda was the 6th oldest book on my owned ebooks TBR, so I’ve been meaning to read it for a while, and I’m so glad I finally have but also sad because I read the Inda and there is no more Inda (though there are fanfics, I’ll get to that).

So, the thing about Inda is that it’s very good. And I don’t just mean I enjoy it a lot. It has ideas and it follows them through with their implications. Basic magics that exist in the world shape society in different ways. The cultures have aspects that only make sense in this world because of the way it works and the history they have. The world feels big and lived in. Everything that’s slightly suspicious at one point or another has a deliberate explanation. The characters are so well developed. The action is so much fun. Except when it’s harrowing.

My favorite part of the series is about how growing up and growing older makes you see things differently than when you were young and knew it all, and it’s so so well done, all through. The Marlovans, the main people we follow, are very violent and warlike. We start the book just accepting this as the way things are, but then the more we see of the world, and the more characters see the more questions it raises. And then the whole series ends with a series of epilogues and some characters thinking back on events and their roles in them, I was crying for hours I was so ruined.

This review will be spoiler free and as vague as I can reasonably make it, with more spoiler thoughts hidden at the end.

Structure:

Inda is a 4 book series set in a wider world in which Smith has been writing all her life, so it’s quite heavy on the worldbuilding. There is a pretty steep learning curve in book 1 part 1, but by the end of it I felt I had a good graps of the world (emphasis on felt, I had as good a grasp as the characters did) and the characters were interesting enough to keep me very engaged through the more confusing bits.

It follows Inda’s life and times, from when he’s a kid well into adulthood. What worked really well for me is that it starts from a tight focus and then we learn more and more about the world. I thought this was well done in the way it made me care about all the different places. 

There are some quirks in the structure that took a little getting used to: 

• The names – I am terrible with names, books, real life, terrible. And this book has a lot of them, and it does the thing I hate where people are referred to by different names. So pretty early on I printed out the names from the author’s website which helped, and I only ended up having a to reference a few times before I got used to the main cast.
• The two part structure of the books – each book is in 2 parts, and it was pretty jarring when we suddenly switched focus from one set of characters to the others. But the new ones grew on me very quickly and I got over it soon
• PoV switches – I found the writing style flowy and easy to follow, after I got used to the PoV switches that are sometimes abrupt. The 3rd person omniscient isn’t very popular these days so it was bit of a hurdle for me to get over at the start. I think it worked very well for the story though.

The characters 

Indevan Algara-vayir (Inda) is perfect and precious and I love him. I know I’ve mentioned it before, but the growth of these characters, chef’s kiss. Inda is our very capable protagonist. He’s got one very specific kind of smarts that make him a great battle strategist. Ability to pick up social ques not found though, sometimes that’s for the better. 

What I love about Inda is how he starts off a golden child, and then we realise how much that is because of his unique specific training and background, and because his natural talent fits perfectly with what’s required to succeed in his home environment. The more the environment changes the more he faces stuff he’s not equipped to handle. 

I generally hate the “young teen beats adults in a fight” trope, except, when it happens here we’re shown exactly how and why that is in a way that makes sense and is perfectly consistent with the world and the styles of fighting used. 

I don’t wanna talk too specifically about other characters in the spoiler free section. I loved how everyone is real, with their own fears and motivations. Even the characters I would unleash violent murder upon, I mostly understand where they’re coming from. There’s a recurring theme about the morality of ends and means that I thought was interesting. 

Just to give you a vague idea some of my other favorites are:

•  a king struggling with trust and responsibility, 
• two very beautiful characters who have different ways of dealing with people reacting to their beauty, 
• Loyal, dependable and capable friend and family
• An adventurous girl who hates kings
• A queen torn between past and present home, well, actually that’s a lot of characters that deal with those feelings
• Hot pirate that fights good and dresses well
• A bunch of selfish scheming people who spoilers spoilers spoilers

There are a few characters that have names, titles and nicknames, all from the same age group, that I always kinda struggled to keep completely separated in my head, esp in the first book. 

The world 

There are a few basic and widely available magics that shape this world. I love this so much, because it makes perfect sense that if available people would use such small spells for massive improvements and they are explored. They have to do with health and hygene: 

• The waste spell – there a simple spell that any toddler can use that disappears any bodily fluid
• Ensorceled buckets – there are bespelled buckets that make the water in them clean anything it touches

These two spells are massive improvements to public sanitation, spread of disease is not really a problem cause everyone has acces to clean water and easy waste disposal. (there is a plotline about how big of a problem it is for rulers if the magic starts failing) 

• Reproductive magic – this is explained briefly as a throw away, it’s not a spoiler just the way the world works. People cannot get pregnant by accident, there’s a deliberate but widely available way to get pregnant, even in the case of reproductive health issues, and sexual violence has been magically removed from the world in the past. 

This has 2 interesting consequences: 

• Family planning is very deliberate and people might have people later than we’re used to, or at specific times in their lives. It’s tied into the country’s political system, especially for nobility families. 
• Attitudes to sex and romance – because the risks are much lower than in the real world, sex and sex work are generally accepted. Marriages are often more to do with practicality than romance, especially for the nobility, which is also true in a lot of human history, but in Inda they are very transparent and open about that. People are also very chill and accepting about queerness with quite a few queer couples through the series.

There are also other stronger magics, but we’re in a sort of post-magic era in this part of the world, where only these few remnants exist. And what other stuff we learn about is rather concerning. 

I think it also ties in to the reproductive magic, and the Marlovan’s past, but gender roles are far more even-footed than most medieval-ish books. Though there are still strict lines and roles, men and women both train daily for fighting, and there’s a sort of assumed respect and collaboration between them. Other countries have different ways, but none that just copy-paste our world.

If you like keeping track of fantasy maps have I got good news for you! If you’re terrible at keeping track of fantasy maps, well, so am I. There are two continents important in our story, with several nations. Because so much of the story is about travel and conflict between these countries, even I, life-long lazy about maps person, had to give in and study the map enough to get a general gist of the situation. Another thing I thought was well done is how important roads and distances are, and how the way Marlovans are pretty isolated in the world checks out. 

The story

It’s hard to talk about the story vaguely, because so much changes and is interconnected. So I’ll just mention a few aspects I thought were cool without going into them: 

• Military academy – this is at the start of the series and it’s fun, about challenges, making friends and enemies and lifelong relationships
• Boats – a lot of this series is on boats. Different kinds of boats, with lots of boat language. It is explained but I still don’t have a firm grasp of ship parts, but I feel like I do enough to make the books easy to follow. There are some immensely fun ship fights, super creative and just plain awesome to read about 
• Politics – I loved how we got to see different country’s politics, and how the main characters go from blaming others for their decisions to struggling with the same decisions themselves. 
• Imperialism – I guess this is more a theme than a story thing – I liked how we see through the eyes of conquered and conquerors and the way that whole aspect develops through the story

Spoiler thoughts (coherency optional): 

Spoilers by books but I’m not having success explaining that to wordpress:

Post credit scene: 

On Sherwood Smith’s website she includes a general write-up of what happens later, and links to a few fan fictions: 

Here is what happened after the end of Treason’s Shore. More about Evred  here. More about Fox at the same site.. And More about Tdor), plus more about Jeje.

There was also a r/fantasy readalong for Inda, back in 2016-2017, I think it might have been the first one on the sub. Before my time, but it was what originally made me want to read it.

Bingo squares:

A Book from r/Fantasy’s Top LGBTQIA List, Book Club OR Readalong Book, Name in the Title (Inda, The Fox), Award Finalist, But Not Won HM (King’s Shield), No Ifs, Ands, or Buts (Inda, King’s Shield, Treason’s Shore), Family Matters – normal mode all, HM Treason’s Shore

Me in school: 250 word essay is too long!

Me now: I cannot possibly explain how much I loved Inda in under 2500 words.

TL, DR: book good, do read, great characters, military school, pirate battles, cool world