The Hollow Heart by Marie Rutkoski

⭐⭐⭐⭐

At first, The Hollow Heart feels a little hollow in itself. After the earnest, slightly steamy romance of The Midnight Lie, with it's whip-smart banter, intricate worldbuilding and startlingly realistic portrayal of abuse, it's hard not to at first feel disappointed when you don't get the same heart back. The Hollow Heart felt like I book I would love if I didn't have The Midnight Lie to spring my expectations hundreds of stories high. (Stories. Haha. Anyway.)

The Hollow Heart begins with Nirrim back in Ethin building her bloody reign of power while Sid sails back home and deals with the intricacies of being a nonbinary lesbian in the royal family (I'm not even joking) and tries to solve the mystery of her mother's illness, which the queen suspects to be poisioning and directs her best spy (her child) to seek out her killer.

The book is split between three narrative parts, Sid, Nirrim's, and a omnipresent narrator called "The God", who tells the story of how Ethin came to be and then how Nirrim came to be. In all honesty, I really only cared about Sid's chapters. Nirrim isn't herself, and it's very hard to watch and/or care? She has these wild, inner debates with "Other Nirrim", herself before the trade who she sees as weak for having cared about people.

And also, she becomes an imperialist. So that's just... great. /s

I think it kind of flies in the face of everything Nirrim stood for and learned about herself in the first book, and doing an extreme reversal like this could be effective, but I think in order to make a Dark!Nirrim it has to have some deeper significance or parallel.

So if it was up to me I would shift it into a trilogy, and just like Nirrim got to narrate her own first book, Sid gets the second without any other perspectives, just at the end she realizes the horror of what Nirrim's done, and then the entire third book is about them fixing Nirrim and then we get to spend a long chunk of time with Sid and Nirrim rebuilding their relationship after, maybe mixed perspective between the two of them.

(The end of this book is particularly grating for me- when has the series been about Sid saving Nirrim?)

But anyway, that's not how it goes, and from what I can tell, how you get to enjoy The Hollow Heart is by divorcing it from a lot of The Midnight Lie and accepting it for what it is:

A story about a royal trans masc/nonbinary lesbian sailor spy solving a palace mystery and negotiating her identity with her family.

(Again. Not joking!)

The main thing I had to work through once I sort of got past the fact that I wasn't going to get to hear my favorite couple banter was that Sid's parents are really nothing like they're described to us in The Midnight Lie. Or should I say, the real midnight lie (a lie made to smooth a situation over, a white lie) of The Midnight Lie is that Sid's parents didn't force her to get married?

Instead of these deeply homophobic, traditional archetypes, Sid's parents were something much more familiar to me- two straight, cis parents trying and failing and trying again to understand their child, and do their best, even if their best is sometimes lacking. This section where Sid and her mother reunite was what first grabbed me:

"Sidarine."Her voice is weak.

"Sid,"I correct.

She nods slightly, golden hair brushing the pillow. "Sid," she says, and I feel petty for forcing her, in her illness, to use my little name. But she knows my preference. It is not new, and she is too smart to pretend she forgets.

This miniscule exchange hit me so hard. Sidarine is a deadname to Sid, she "jokes" in the first book to Nirrim that they won't be friends ever again if she ever says it. When she comes home, after not seeing her mother for months, her mom deadnames her, probably out of familiarity and sickness. Sid corrects her, not with any malice or hardness, but simply to tell her "no, that's not who I am. That's not how I want to be seen." And of course, the rush of guilt comes after when we tell the people who have raised us that they're wrong, that they must continue to unlearn the past and see us in a new way. This is so, so painfully familiar! It's not that Sid's parents are evil, or even unattentive. Sid's father is constantly asking her why she ran away and what he can do. Her mom and Roshar keep asking if she really wants this marriage. She has allies, and yet dealing with allies is the most complicated thing of all.

The scene that truly stuck out to me was when Sid starts a traditional greeting among men with her father. He appears confused at first, but touches her forehead in the traditional way all the same. As queer and trans kids we're often looking for things that our parents don't know to give us. Marie Rutkoski understands that so intimately and portrays it so well.

Overall, Sid's sections meant so much to me, so even if I wanted something different out of this book I feel like I took so many empowering, meaningful things away all the same.