Summer Reading Project, BookLikes Satellite

I’ve always hated it when politicians use the term “boots on the ground.” The synecdoche reduces soldiers to inanimate objects, dehumanizing them, and making it easy to forget that we ask soldiers to fight and die for us. The question of what it really means to be a soldier is central to Robert Jackson Bennett’s City of Blades. In this novel, we see warfare at its worst. In the history of the Continent (introduced in Bennett’s City of Stairs), soldiers were a tool of a war-mad goddess. We see soldiers making war on civilians. But we also see our protagonist asking soldiers to be more than just boots on the ground. General Turyin Mulaghesh wants to remind her fellow soldiers and her country that an army is a force for good...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.