It’s easy to imagine people overreacting to a scary, hemorrhagic disease, but the story seems to think they’re right. The Kettling is very clearly described as spread through contact with blood, but everyone acts as if it is as infectious as smallpox. In this era where everyone is an armchair epidemiologist, I have no qualifications but nevertheless will say I wasn’t convinced by some of the details.
This disease is much more similar to the Ebola virus than coronavirus, but the resulting quarantines, restrictions, and deaths may be either unwelcome reminders of our current situation or unusually compelling, depending on a reader’s feelings and situation.
One quick thing to note at the outset is that although these novels were written before Covid-19, pandemic disease was a plot point in Tyrant and even more important in these books, which feature the unexpected emergency of an originally bat-borne disease called the Kettling. The two were originally planned as one book, so while Monster ends on a cliffhanger without much resolution, taken together the pair of books tell a second complete story about Baru. The Monster Baru Cormorant and the Tyrant Baru Cormorant are the second and third books out of a projected four in the series. Although the first in a series, it ended with a good sense of closure, having seemingly answered a lot of the questions it asked of its heroine. Seth Dickinson’s debut novel, The Traitor Baru Cormorant, introduced us to its eponymous heroine who chooses to serve the empire oppressing her homeland, hoping to work secretly from within to liberate her people.
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