The Empress of Time by Kylie Lee Baker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The Empress of Time is the conclusion to Kylie Lee Baker’s The Keeper of the Night duology. This story follows Ren Scarborough, who is half-British Reaper, half-Japanese Shinigami.
In the first book, Ren and her half-brother, Neven, fled London for Japan, where Ren hoped to learn more about her mother and her Shinigami roots.
Once there, Ren was given a difficult quest by the Goddess of Death. She needed to find and eliminate three dangerous Yokai demons.
Along with her brother and a new friend, Hiro, Ren’s quest kept me glued to the pages. Death work is difficult business. It’s fast-paced with extremely high-stakes. Over the course of the first novel, I became easily attached to this group of characters.
Additionally, the first book had a fairly earth-shattering conclusion, so I have been anxiously awaiting this second installment.
In The Empress of Time, Ren has now been ruling the Japanese Underworld as the Goddess of Death for the past decade. She is no longer the same conflicted girl who fled the streets of London all those years ago.
Now Ren has received startling news that her past has come back to haunt her though. There are British Reapers approaching the shores of Japan. They’re here for Ren, for vengeance.
Ren seeks help and is again sent out on what seems to be an impossible quest. This time she must find and retrieve a magical sword said to have been missing for thousands of years.
With Hiro gone, Ren is joined this time around by the moon god Tsukuyomi, Hiro’s brother, on her mission. Together the two race throughout the country trying to find the object they seek before time runs out for Ren.
As mentioned above, I have been really excited to get this second book. It was just as intriguing as the first one. I was a little surprised by the huge time jump, however. I was sort of anticipating this would pick up right where the first book left off, but that wasn’t the case.
It did take me a little bit to come to terms with that.
As with the first book, Kylie Lee Baker really succeeds with the dark, beautiful imagery she is able to conjure up with this. And when I say dark, I mean it.
There’s a lot of death, mutilation, even the occasional consumption of body parts. It gets bloody, dangerous and gruesome, but we love to see that in a Fantasy.
I loved the inclusion of so many elements from Japanese folklore and myth. The world is well-constructed and worked really well over the course of this story.
Another thing I really enjoyed about this was how Baker kept the themes from the first book alive. For example, in the first book there’s a big focus on Ren’s heritage and her inner conflict over being half-British Reaper and half-Japanese Shinigami.
For Ren, she never felt like she belonged in London and she was in fact treated like an outsider by the other Reapers.
In this book, even though Ren has found a bit more peace with who she is, she still doesn’t feel like she has a true place she belongs. Particularly at the start of this.
So, bringing the Reapers to Japan and now having the Shinigami battle on her behalf, it was like the two sides of her being having an external conflict, instead of just the inner one from the first book. I am most likely explaining this terribly, but I found it really interesting.
This story was still about Ren searching for the place she truly belonged, but the playing field and the actors were so much larger in scope than in the first book. There has been a great evolution to Ren’s character, but she is still a character in deep need of finding greater meaning for herself.
With that in mind, I loved how this concluded. The final little section was the icing on the cake. A conclusion that seems fitting for the life that Ren lived.
I definitely recommend this to fans of Dark Fantasy, Japanese-Inspired Fantasy and classic quest tales. Kylie Lee Baker really knows how to wrap it up. This was a beautiful finale for this lush story.
Thank you so much to the publisher, Inkyard Press and Dreamscape Media, for providing me with copies to read and review.
I had a lot of fun with this duology and definitely look forward to reading more from this author in the future!