A Fan's Playground

I read the first book in this duology more than two years ago, so when I decided it was FINALLY time to get round to Realm of Ash, the second book, I did a quick reread of Empire of Sand first, just to remind myself of what happened. The first time I read Empire of Sand, it took me until 100 pages in to be drawn in, but this time I fully appreciated everything the first 100 pages were doing too, which I was so glad of. It's doing great things! And then. Realm of Ash! Also great all the way through.

These books are set in an alternate universe world inspired by Mughal India, and are fantasy romances about the evils of empire.

The heroines of the two books are sisters who have mixed ancestry: their father is of the Ambhan people, the people of the Empire, and their mother is Amrithi, a derided and oppressed people group of the desert. I loved seeing how different the two women's experience of their heritage was, both challenging in different ways. Mehr, the elder sister, knew her birth mother for a part of her childhood and was deeply connected to her Amrithi heritage and hated how in her father's house she was forced to suppress that part of herself. And Arwa, the younger, was raised entirely Ambhan, and discovers as an adult the pain of what it means to be so disconnected from a people and a culture that should have been hers to access.

The books are also about the importance of TEAMWORK in romance, and let me tell you I AM HERE FOR IT. In both books the heroine, before coming to a place of loving her romantic lead, first gets to experience working together with him towards a common goal, and having the hero and heroine respect each other and work well together and appreciate each other's values and skills. Yes please. I love this for a romance. This is SO much more my jam than love at first sight!!! And in the second book, Realm of Ash, they're explicit about this with each other - they call each other partners, and talk about how they're a "mystical order of two" as they study the things they need to study to reach their goals. I adore this for them.

I love the worldbuilding stuff that these books are doing too, and that continues in Realm of Ash. Also continuing: characters who have complicated relationships to other people, and characters who do bad things for understandable reasons. LOVE that stuff.

I also think I didn't talk enough in my last review of Empire of Sand about how much relationships between women are so well depicted in these books. But they are! In both books! There are so many women, and women in community with each other, and women having their own priorities, and all that.

(I was talking with my sister this morning about how a lot of male authors, even if they successfully depict an interesting female character or two, don't actually understand that to accurately depict the world, there needs to be a multiplicity of women who have their own lives and aren't just About The Men. One of the reasons I end up reading far fewer male authors in any given year!)

Anyway, Realm of Ash IS its own book doing its own things too, but I keep on talking more about it in the context of its conversation within its duology, I think because Suri is SO good at making it a proper duology Two books that each stand alone just fine but are clearly a matched set that belong to each other and draw out additional things to appreciate if you read them together. So good.

Well, today is the Hugo voting deadline, and I didn't QUITE make it through the last category I was wanting to. But I mostly did! Enough to feel capable of voting the category, at least.

So here's my Astounding Award For Best New Science Fiction Writer voting decisions.

1. Tasha Suri
I read her first book, Empire of Sand, and ADORED it. A delightful historical romantic fantasy, that's most of my fave genres all at once, and wonderfully put together! I was torn between voting for Suri and Tesh for #1, but because Suri's already in her second year of eligibility I decided to rank her first. Tesh will have another chance next year.

2. Emily Tesh
Tesh's first book, Silver in the Wood, is lovely and perfect and I loved it. Queer people and forest magic and folklore and history! Very good and I hope to be voting Tesh #1 next year!

3. Jenn Lyons
Look her book is like a zillion pages long, it's a lot and I just didn't have time to get through it what with all the other Hugos reading I had to do (and all the other reading I couldn't stop myself from doing). I read the first little bit of The Ruin of Kings and it was really promising though, I liked what I read, so I think she's worth ranking this high even if I haven't gotten a full picture of all her skills as a writer.

4. RF Kuang
I started reading The Poppy War and found it compelling but I was nervous about where it was going based on vague memories of things I'd heard about it before, so I googled it and then went NOPE THIS IS NOT FOR ME. Sorry Kuang, you're a very good writer but a book about a person becoming angrily and violently vengeful is not something I want to put in my eyeballs.

5. Nibedita Sen
Sen's Hugo packet had 3 short stories in it, and you know, they were fine, but that's about as much interest as I can muster.

6. Sam Hawke
I started reading the book that was included in the Hugo packet and just....did not care at all. So I gave up. Possibly if I'd given it more of a chance it would have perked up, it might just have a slow start, but oh well, my caprice was apparently in charge when I read this one.