Obsidian: Awakening (Book one of Obsidian Series)

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She’d stopped thinking of it as a privilege after that, and had always tried to forgive him afterward when he refused to share those visions with her. But don’t be fooled, they develop their own voices soon enough and that initial sameness and arrogance washes away. She was the light of his life, and since her death at the hands of the Rashais, there has been something he’s never had again. Forced to flee into the most hostile territory belonging to deadly desert warriors, he is captured by Djari, the dutiful daughter of a tribe leader who offers him a choice between death and a lifetime of servitude.

Now, corrupted by hate and brokennness and atrocities as that love is, he’s come face to face with it. It has more twists and turns than a rollercoaster, with cliff-hangers at the end of most chapters, and is full of nuances and subtext. Im going into spoilers straight away below, but if you love epic fantasy and great writing, pick this up immediately.

It is not a light read for anyone who needs trigger warnings of any kind, and is written for a specific audience who enjoys grimdark stories, with no incorruptible heroes in sight and no promise of a happy, fulfilling ending. In the opening of the book, the dangerous prince and heir to the Salar of Rasharwi, who has just been victorious in battle over some of his enemies, intervenes before a Bharavi woman can be ravished by one of his generals. It’s a desert storm of enthralling confusion, of incense smoke and mirrors, packed with duality, prophecy, foreshadowing and hidden meanings, and offering reflections on the failings of our own world. Most of the characters are broken and scarred, some very literally, and we experience their motivations, flaws, weaknesses and all their passions through all their senses.

Raina thinks giant balls floating in space can have the same magic that fairytales teach us to look for in oak trees and stars. At first I was quite put-off by some of the disturbing on-page savagery, but then in hindsight I slowly found myself appreciating some of those events more as I saw how they continued to have a long-lasting impact on the characters and realised how pivotal they were to their personal journeys. Both his parents want to mold him into their image of what he should be, without any consideration for whether he has a reason to be that, for who he is.The personal and political stakes are high for everyone and the book is seething and simmering with external and internal conflict on so many levels as the characters fight with each other and themselves. But Nazir is hiding secrets of his own, and his dalliance with a sworn enemy could also have sweeping repercussions for his Kha’gan.

She also bears the Salar a favoured son, Lasura, who must fight for dominance and his very life among his many half-brothers from various other wives of the Salar. My husband, as my alpha reader, is always hitting me over the head about not cramming every novel in my head into a single book. Two cultures engaged in a longstanding war become enflamed as the manipulations of those who wants to take a powerful king down start turning the wheels in motion. The tension, both on a grand political scale and on an intimate personal scale, is simply sharper than a knife and left me completely breathless at times, which made this an exhausting reading experience in the best way possible. I realised it was because the desert plot involving Djari/Lasura/Hasheem didn’t contribute to the climax of the novel (it may set up the sequel).Each of them is powerful and ambitious, yet most of them don’t have complete agency over their actions. There was a reason he’d decided to hold back Lady’s fate until today, and guilt was why he had come.

These include but not limited to: torture, hatred, enslavement, prejudice, rape, murder, sexual abuse of children, forced prostitution, genocide. Would you rather be safe behind walls and part of the machine or be free and vulnerable to the many dangers in the world?As it was, it felt like neither of them had the emotional intelligence to stop the game playing, and - rather than being determinedly vengeful - Zahara seemed merely petty. Despite being together for almost twenty years, with a son between them, Muradi and Zahara didn’t seem to have moved on from her performatively hating him during sex and passionately wanting him dead.