An Ember in the Ashes

[Amy]

So. Here’s a confession: I did not want to read this book.

It made it on my book club list because early reviews were outstanding – but when I read the flap copy and the blurbs, I rolled my eyes. (Maybe I rolled my eyes several times.) Faux-Roman empire. Soldier boy. Slave girl. Comparisons to Harry Potter, and The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones. We’ve heard all of that before, over and over and over again.

Alas, my cynicism is showing, isn’t it?

But if we could have a small sidebar about flap copy: I loathe flap copy. It’s designed as a read-alike concept, but then what too often happens is the most shallow comparison: Kids at war? The Hunger Games. Romance? Twilight. Vampires? Also, Twilight. Political intrigue? Game of Thrones. Publishers, please, if you love me at all (you don’t, I know!), pretty please give me flap copy that tells you what about this book is amazing, not how it is exactly like 50 other books. Because I have read those 50 other books and maybe I liked them, but often I didn’t, but regardless, I’ve already read those books, and you aren’t making me want to read this book.

Which is terrible, because this book? Nothing like Harry Potter. Nothing like The Hunger Games or Game of Thrones. It’s its very own thing and that is awesome.

So let’s try this a different way. Ignore all that stuff above.

We’re in a brutal land, ruled by a cruel emperor equally bent on conquest and suppressing his own people, from slaves to nobility. Power is gained from military might, and the highest honor in the land is being accepted at the empire’s military academy: a ruthless exercise in strength and loyalty that culminates in joining the empire’s most elite police force.

Elias, scion of a great military house and the academy’s best student, is on the cusp of graduation – and also considering deserting. He doesn’t like the whippings, the rape, the oppression found even in the empire’s most revered institution, or the fact that his mother, who left him to die as a baby, is Commandant. Laia is a Scholar, one of a conquered people who now live destitute under the iron rule of the empire. When her grandparents are killed and her brother kidnapped, she stumbles into the Resistance and offers them anything to help her get him back. They send her into the academy as a slave to the academy’s Commandant – and a spy for the Resistance.

An Ember in the Ashes is two things: compulsively readable and often unexpected. Elias and Laia are both real characters with real complexities and real personalities. He’s the one with the physical strength, but she’s relentless. He’s wholly competent and still makes a muck of things; she’s new to this world and obviously makes a muck of things. Somehow, miraculously, probably because I liked them both, the point-of-view shifts between the two didn’t bother me at all. (And you know they usually do!)

Let’s talk for a second about secondary characters. Tahir’s world feels very masculine, with most of the power reserved for men. This bugs (Lord save me from endless emperors and bring on the empresses), but the female secondary characters that are there -- the Commandant, the lieutenant of the Resistance, Laia’s dead mother (whose legacy looms large in both Laia’s path and the country’s), Laia’s slave friend Kitchen-Girl, the Cook in the Commandant’s house, and Elias’s best friend, Aquilla – are tremendous. From start to finish, those women are amazing: varied, complex, with histories and ambitions and skills and determination. I’m never a fan of books re-told from someone else’s point of view, but I’d happily devour a version of An Ember in the Ashes from Aquilla’s point of view.

Two things, in parting:

First, An Ember in the Ashes is the beginning of a series, and I know how over series some of you are. I sympathize: I’m often reluctant to start series until they’re finished and oh, how often I long for standalones. Why is nothing ever a standalone? (Oh, the drama!)

Second, book recommendations and professional reviews are worth their weight in gold. An Ember in the Ashes made it on my list because of the pre-publication buzz from reviewers and friends that I trust. And I’m so, so glad that it did!

Amy