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I was going to start reading “The Inheritance Trilogy” by N.K. Jemisin to fulfill the requirement to “read the first book in a series by a person of color” for Book Riot’s Read Harder Challenge this year, but then I picked up a copy of Sabaa Tahir’s debut novel and it kept calling my name and I just couldn’t resist any longer (sorry Jemisin! I promise to get on your bandwagon soon).
This book is a real page turner! Despite being more than 400 pages, I devoured this book in just a few days. The pages go quickly, but it’s also the kind of book that makes you forego less important things (like work and sleep) in favor of reading just one more chapter. Except most chapters end on a cliffhanger, so it’s never just one more chapter. Seriously, this book was like a bag of potato chips and it was so tempting to eat the whole bag by myself in one sitting.
The book takes place in a fantasy world in a kingdom known only as “the Empire.” The Empire has an hierarchy, like any other society, and Scholars (a term that appears to apply to a race in this book) are at the bottom of that hierarchy. Many of them are enslaved, but even those who are free have extremely limited means of making a living for themselves.
The book is told in first person from the point of view of two characters, Laia and Elias, with the book alternating perspectives from one chapter to the next. Laia is a Scholar who lost both her parents and her older sister when she was very young. They were all part of the Resistance, a Scholar organization intent on bringing down the Empire, and they died on a mission. Laia’s not clear on what the mission was, but she does know there was a mole in the Resistance who betrayed her parents. She does not know who the mole was.
Since then, it’s just been Laia, her older brother, Darin, and their grandparents. The book opens with a raid on their house that ends in both grandparents getting killed and Darin arrested. Laia makes a run for it and the Mask (deadly assassin) who takes Darin lets her get away.
Laia spends the rest of the book cursing herself for leaving her brother, even though it’s obvious they both would have died if she had tried to fight. So she dedicates herself to finding a way to free her brother and decides to start at the Resistance because she thinks her brother was working for them. The Resistance sends her on a mission to gather intelligence from the Commandant at Blackcliff by working as her slave. The catch is the Commandant so tough on her slaves that they tend not to live very long.
Elias is a student at Blackcliff who’s about to graduate and become a Mask. The training a Blackcliff is so intense that many students never make it out alive. But just as he’s about to get out of there, Elias is planning his escape from the Empire. If he stays, he’ll be forced to work as a Mask and do all the Empire’s dirty work (which also happens to be very bloody). He has decided to wait until graduation to escape because that is when it will be least suspected and everyone will be so occupied with the celebrations they won’t notice him slipping out.
That is until it’s announced the Emperor is about to die without any offspring, and so there will be a series of Trials to determine who the next emperor will be. As head of his class, Elias has been chosen as one of the four contestants in the Trials. Like the rest of their training, the Trials are extremely dangerous and not everyone is expected to survive them.
Throughout the course of the book Laia’s and Elias’s paths keep crossing and they’re definitely attracted to each other, although they’re both also attracted to other characters, which I guess makes it a love square? They’re both busy fighting this attraction and the Empire in their own ways. The ending is exciting and climatic, but definitely leaves an opening for a sequel which I may or may not have purchased before finishing this book…
My one complaint was that Laia started off pretty weak and whiny. I understand she was stuck in an impossible situation, but that doesn’t mean I want to listen to her constantly dithering about what to do and how scared she is. At some point you’ve got to put on your big girl pants and get shit done.
Fortunately, it doesn’t take her too long to figure that out. By the end of the book she has discovered her inner badass and started facing her fears head on and I liked her so much better for it!
What did you guys read this week? Anything else that made you put off other books for a while longer?