Title: An Ember in the Ashes (#1)
Author: Sabaa Tahir
I'm about 190 pages in, so I'm making my way through.
This book got allllll the hype last year. I'm talking all of it. It was marketed as a YA Fantasy Stand-Alone, but that turned out to be a lie. There is going to be a sequel coming out in the coming months, and I've now heard it's supposed to be a 4 book series. I'm not mad that it's going to be a series, I love series! I'm just mad that they misled us. Why not just say it was going to be a series in the first place!?
Anyway, a vague description of this book would be that it's loosely based on a Romanesque kind of setting. Think bloodthirsty Spartans and Intellectual Athenites. In this case, they are called Martials and Scholars. The Martials came into town and took everything over, years ago, and conquered everybody. The Scholar people are now viewed as lower than dirt. They are not allowed to pursue their intellectuals studies and it is illegal for them to even know how to read. Laia is a Scholar whose brother is taken prisoner by the Martials. With her family gone, she vows to do whatever she can to save her brother. Even if it means becoming a slave to a woman with no soul in order to spy and gain information for the Resistance. Elias is a Mask, the most elite solider in the Martial army. He's gone to a brutal school for the past 14 years, and can't wait to escape. But Fate comes to play in a crazy way and things just get so much more intense.
What do I think of it so far? Hmmm I'm not exactly sure. I'm not hating it, I can tell you that, but the hype that this book gets and continues to get, scares me. I don't want to set myself up for awesomeness and then get bogged down by mediocrity. Hype can be sooo dangerous. So far, it's not a 5 star read for me. I'm enjoying it, but I'm not proclaiming my love for it over the rooftops. So we'll see how this goes.
One thing I don't understand is why Laia would go along with such a stupid plan to become a slave to this awful woman. A woman who seems to me to be a sociopath. All her slaves are marred and injured daily. It just seems like a bad plan and who knows if the Resistance will even live up to their end of the deal. And Laia's spying isn't going so well at the moment. I do like imagining how attractive all these characters are though, that's always a fun thing to do. So that's what my thoughts are at the moment.
So that's what I'm Reading Right Now! Tell me what you are reading in the comments. If you've read An Ember in the Ashes tell me what you thought of it. Did you think it was awesome? Or did the hype let you down? I'd be curious to know.
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