Natasha Pulley - The Kingdoms

Joe Tournier has a bad case of amnesia. His first memory is of stepping off a train in the nineteenth-century French colony of England. The only clue Joe has about his identity is a century-old postcard of a Scottish lighthouse that arrives in London the same month he does. Written in illegal English-instead of French-the postcard is signed only with the letter “M,” but Joe is certain whoever wrote it knows him far better than he currently knows himself, and he's determined to find the writer. The search for M, though, will drive Joe from French-ruled London to rebel-owned Scotland and finally onto the battle ships of a lost empire's Royal Navy. In the process, Joe will remake history, and himself.
From bestselling author Natasha Pulley, The Kingdoms is an epic, wildly original novel that bends genre as easily as it twists time.

Comment: I must have seen some positive mention of this book somewhere in 2021, which was when I added this book to my TBR. I can't remember what exactly caught my interest but I must have perceived it would feature a m/m couple and some romance.

In this story we meet Joe Tournier, at the right moment he steps out of a train without any notion whatsoever of why he is there and, most importantly, who he is. He is clearly amnesic, and when someone helps him, taking him into a hospital, he is even more surprised to find out he is a slave but thankfully his master and his wife were looking for him and he can go back home after a while. Joe is still confused and he has strange memories or hallucinations and he just can't remember... he finds a postcard in his pocket, and he believes it might be from the person he is missing, for he feels something isn't right about the feelings he has towards those close to him. One day, he has the opportunity to travel to the Hebrides, for there is a lighthouse there, and Joe is an exert on the machinery necessary to fix it... Joe knows his amnesia might be related to that lighthouse and he wants to try to find out.... but will he believe what he will find?

This story is divided into sections, and the first one was really incredible, with the reader following Joe as he tries to come up with the reality of living in an occupied UK, after the loss of the Napoleonic war, but more important, as he tries to understand who he is and how he got to arrive in a train he can't recall entering. I think the author was bold in this introduction and I was quite curious to see what would happen. Like Joe, I was convinced he would discover something special at the lighthouse, which he did, but not exactly as I imagined...

I think the idea of this book is very clever. Well, not the idea itself, for time travel novels aren't new, but the way the plot develops and how we feel as lost as Joe as he tries to understand things. Until Joe arrives at the lighthouse, I felt the pace, the vibe, the writing style were all working well together, and despite the obvious secrecy, I felt I knew where this might go. I do confess my primary hope was one for romance, that Joe had somehow been lost in time and now needed to find out where and when he was from and find again a lost love which we kind of were hinted at that Joe had left, perhaps unwillingly.

Well, this is, indeed, a time travel story and I can see the author has done a lot of research to try to maintain dates that could help the reader have a small notion of what was going on in different times. As soon as Joe finds out about the way it is possible to time travel and how he seems to be different people in different times but cannot remember things well, I will admit that I've started to become lost and confused among the several situations and jumps. From what I understood, people in the UK at one of the "realities" lost the war to France, in another they didn't, in yet another a ship was caught at the wrong time and the occupants arrested... I can't be certain about the sequence of things, though.

What I can say is that from a certain point on, the story was all about ships and wars and conspiracies and battles and many, many secrets and complicated people which weren't always easy to read or to like. Since I was still confused, I will say I've lost a bit of interest on what was happening, at least until a certain moment, closer to the end of the novel, where it felt as if things were getting steadier for Joe. At that moment in the plot, some information comes forward and a few secrets get uncovered, well, more or less explained and not exactly uncovered since I think a few things weren't that hard to guess (only how they happened).

In terms of execution, therefore, I don't think this was done as well as it could. I've felt the author wanted to delay the "uncovering" of secrets and that made many plot points harder to understand. Joe is a good protagonist but the secondary characters weren't as captivating. The romance, which was a possibility I wanted to see developed turned out to be incredible subtle and thinking of it, very unsuitable if I take into consideration the way things went on in the different realities... I say this because I don't think there was a romance at all. Only the very end of the book might hint at it and even then, the plot choices made it less special, in my opinion.

All things considered, this was perhaps too much for my limited ability to grasp the real goal, but despite a few elements, despite the beginning which I liked and was so perfectly atmospheric and moody, the rest of the story just did not convince me and many pages were confusing and even not that appealing, so... not all bad, but not that good either.

Grade: 5/10