You are an ember in the ashes, Elias Veturius. You will spark and burn, ravage and destroy. You cannot change it. You cannot stop it.
— Sabaa Tahir, An Ember in the Ashes
Laia, once a simple girl living under the rule of the Empire, has her world shattered when soldiers raid her home and abduct her brother. Desperate to get him back, she seeks out the Resistance and agrees to spy for them in exchange for his rescue. But Laia suspects the Resistance is sending her to her doom. She is to pose as a slave and serve under the Commandant, a heartless woman who runs the most ruthless institution in the Empire: Blackcliff Academy.
Elias is the top student at the academy. While many of his fellow students have died in the perilous education of Blackcliff, he has risen to the top. Despite all this, he hates the oppression he has been trained to enforce. As he seeks a way to be free, his story intertwines with Laia’s, and two of them walk into a destiny that will shape the entire Empire.
There was never a dull moment in Sabaa Tahir’s An Ember in the Ashes, and that’s what made it…
…not so unique.
It stays too close to the popular tropes:
- Have a group of teens fighting an oppressive institution (Hunger Games, Divergent, Maze Runner).
- Put the protagonist a love triangle to confuse emotions (Hunger Games again, Twilight, Outlander).
An Ember in the Ashes does all this. And by following the popular trends without taking much of a unique spin on things, the drama becomes something less than special.
I also found some of the battle action sequences to be unrealistic and therefore distracting. At times when enemies and chaos pressed in on all sides, the protagonists somehow had the time and space to comfortably talk and strategize about what they were going to do. And the warrior heroes had unlimited stamina, fighting for hours without getting exhausted. I don’t care how elite you are, if you’re not superhuman, your arm will eventually get tired of swinging a sword.
Despite my critiques, there were parts that held me—parts that plunged me into despair and lifted me up to hope.
I devoured the last third of the book within a day. (I had to hide from my family in order to finish it!) There weren’t any cheap bait-and-switch cliff hangers—which have become all to common in YA novels—and I found myself invested in the characters. I wanted to find out how their high-stakes games of life or death would end. I wasn’t disappointed.
And that just might entice me to read, A Torch Against the Night, the next book of the series.
Have you read An Ember in the Ashes? What are your thoughts on it?
What are you reading lately? Any recommendations? Share in the comments below.