Thank you to Rebellion, Solaris and Netgalley for the review copy in exchange for an honest review. This does not change my opinion in anyway.
Book: Ogres by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Release Date: March 15th 2022
Tags: Science-Fiction | Adult | Rise of a Hero | Revolution | Genetics | Dystopia
Trigger/Content Warnings: Death | Decapitation | Cannibalism | Blood | Torture
Ogres are bigger than you.
Ogres are stronger than you.
Ogres rule the world.
It’s always idyllic in the village until the landlord comes to call.
Because the landlord is an Ogre. And Ogres rule the world, with their size and strength and appetites. It’s always been that way. It’s the natural order of the world. And they only eat people sometimes.
But when the headman’s son, Torquell, dares lift his hand against the landlord’s son, he sets himself on a path to learn the terrible truth about the Ogres, and about the dark sciences that ensured their rule.
Ogres threw me for a while with what kind of a book it was going to be. Ogres suggested fantasy and the cover showed modern technology so one would think it was set in our time. But it isn’t, not really. The story starts with a rural area with landlords, straight out of a medieval setting. So I had no idea where we were going with this.
Add on to that is that this book is written in the second person point of view. Someone is telling Torquell’s story to him really in you format. It threw me for a while but after a while I got quite used to it.
The landlords are the ogres and the humans are being oppressed by them. When Torquell steps out of line and runs, his family gets punished for it. Literally eaten. There is certainly quite a bit of gruesome takes in this book. And Torquell certainly does not keep his hands clean. But one feels for him as one does for the oppressed.
As we dive deeper into the story and learn the origins of the current world one sees the fantasy crack away to leave room for something perhaps more realistic. I won’t give that away but I will say that it made me crawl deeper into the story. I wanted to find out more like Torquell.
In the end I enjoyed this story of Torquell the hero who started a new revolution.
A Dance With Books 
Ooh, dat is een helemaal andere synopsis dan die ik gewoon ben bij deze auteur. Ik heb een aantal van zijn sci-fi boeken op mijn tbr staan toen ik het bizarre en griezelige ‘Walking to Aldebaran’ van hem had gelezen. Klinkt intrigerend deze!
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Ja het is weer heel wat anders deze dan de boeken die ik eerder van hem heb voorbij zien komen of in de kast heb staan. Al moet ik die nog lezen.
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