The Traitor Baru Cormorant was recommended to me at last year’s 4th Street Fantasy convention. It has a great premise: a fantasy set in a world without magic magic, where the magic system comes from politics and economics. Young Baru Cormorant grows up on a Polynesia-like island that gets colonized. She decides to rise through the ranks of her colonizers’ society and destroy it from within.

But it didn’t work for me. Baru’s story contained so much gratuitous misery and awfulness that it had t...