A Song of Wraiths and Ruin (A Song of Wraiths and Ruin, #1)

by Roseanne A. Brown

Come and gather—a story is about to begin!”

To listen to a griot was to enter a new world, one where heroes danced across the heavens with spirits in their wake and gods churned mountains into being with a flick of their wrists.

“The only person I’m interested in marrying is the one who can catch me the moon with their bare hands,”

But his heart raced whenever he thought of the epic love the old stories spoke of. Love so strong people would cross oceans and face down gods just for the chance of it—that

He had wandered into a web, one Driss and Tunde had been born to navigate despite their differing views, spiders at home among the interlocking threads that made up the court.

“She told me that the people we lose never truly leave, but that only we get to define how they stay.”

this wasn’t a proper hunt done with respect to the animals. This was a slaughter.

People tended to believe what they wanted to believe, and no rational person would ever be caught believing in magic.

So Eshran culture was welcome in Ziran as long as actual Eshrans didn’t come with it.

How was someone supposed to speak to the person they were maybe possibly falling for?

Slaves deserve to be remembered just as much as queens.

The princess had goaded him, fought for him, pushed him to find a courage he hadn’t known he’d had, and somewhere between the first moment their fates had crashed into each other and now, the thought of killing her had become unfathomable.

Every scratch in the wood and dent in a pan was a remnant of a childhood that had been filled with as much love as it had been with hardship.

But space was never given to the people the world decided belonged at the bottom.

But it’s also true that to aid even one person is to save an entire world.”

Do not underestimate the strength it takes to be kind in a world as cruel as ours.”

“Why punish a seed for not yet being a tree?”

First, a story ends when it ends, and not a moment before. If you are unhappy with this ending, make a new one.”

Nothing good can come of a place that refuses to see the pain of the people on whose backs it was built.”