An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir

I really enjoyed this first title in Sabaa Tahir’s An Ember in the Ashes young adult fantasy series. While it offers many of the tropes familiar to a fantasy, it puts a unique spin on them and creates something more compelling than so many others in this genre.

Five hundred years ago, the Empire was created when the Martials invaded and destroyed the rule of the dominant Scholars. Ever since, the Scholars have lived in a state of severe oppression, enslaved, and impoverished with no power to fight back against the Martials’ superior weapons and fighting power.

Elias Viturius is about to graduate from Blackcliff, the academy where the Martials’ greatest warriors are trained. As the top of his class in the feared Masks, soldiers who feel nothing and are identified by the silver masks they wear which become fused to their faces over time, he knows his life will be a non-stop horror of killing and brutality. Elias wants nothing to do with any of it and makes a plan to desert the second his graduation ceremony is finished. Getting caught will mean torture and death.

Before he can enact his plan, Elias is approached by one of the immortal holy men of the Empire, an Augur named Cain. Cain can read minds and knows of Elias’s desire to leave it all behind. He explains that very soon, the current emperor will die without an heir, meaning that a handful of elite members of Elias’s Mask class will be required to compete in what are called The Trials to become the next emperor. Elias is to be one of the competitors, along with his best friend, Helene. It is only in winning these trials that Elias can ever hope to really gain his freedom, and although Elias doesn’t actually see how that can happen, he agrees to participate.

After seventeen-year-old Scholar Laia’s grandparents are murdered by the Martials and her brother Darin arrested for treason, she’s guilt-ridden because she ran away instead of staying behind to help him, even though doing so would have cost her life. Desperate and on the run, Laia hunts down a group known as the Resistance and begs them to help her get Darin out of prison. Since they are unwilling to risk so much without getting anything in return, Laia agrees to spy for the Resistance. They want to know details about the Trials, so they arrange for her to serve as a slave for the Commandant at Blackcliff. Unfortunately, the Commandant is a sadistic psychopath known for torturing and murdering her slaves among many others.

As Laia struggles to keep from being brutalized while coming up with enough intel to satisfy the Resistance, Elias struggles to survive the Trials. It’s not until deep into the book that their stories cross, and even later before they begin to affect each other’s lives.

I’ve ranted about books that don’t deserve the positive hype they receive via BookTok, but this time they got it right. In fact, instead of reading Fourth Wing, read An Ember in the Ashes because it is everything that FW is not. The world building makes sense, the characters are fully developed, likable, and display the proper maturity for their lived experiences. Too, the dangerous stakes of the military training are genuine and terrifying. One of the trials Elias must endure absolutely broke my heart, not only for the destruction it brings, but because of the mental and emotional agony it inflicts on him.

I liked that instead of entering Blackcliff as a trainee and then turning out to be some prodigy fighting master, Laia goes undercover as a slave. Her life has been about mundane day-to-day survival, and it’s those skills she employs rather than having some unknown magical chosen-one powers. Through it all, she’s terrified and convinced that she can’t do what she needs to do and will fail her brother. And as a slave, things are horrible for her. She suffers a lot. It’s real.

I also liked that Elias isn’t one of those ‘I’m going to destroy this from within’ kind of heroes. He hates the future life he sees before him and he plans to bail. To just walk away from it all, which is super refreshing. He’s gone through hell during the fourteen years of his training, and he’s so done.

There is no spice in this book, but the chemistry between Laia and Elias is off the charts and you assume they are end-game. So it is very confusing when Helene and Elias are presented as a potential couple. In fact, Elias and Laia don’t even meet until a good way into the book, and even at the end, any feelings between them are only in the fledgling stages. Too, Laia develops feelings for Resistance fighter Keenan, giving us a wonky double love-triangle potential. And while physical romance is never an aspect of any of these relationships, feelings of love do affect the plot in key ways. Since this is a series, I imagine everything will be sorted by the end.

I didn’t like the fact that the main characters’ names were so similar, being Laia (pronounced LYE-uh) and Elias (ee-LYE-us). But otherwise, I can recommend An Ember in the Ashes as a great example of YA fantasy. I hope the rest of the series lives up to the bar this first entry has set.

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