Throne of Glass has been *forgive me* dethroned as my favorite horrible book of all time. An Ember in the Ashes has raised bad literature to an art form. As a fantasy, it’s dismal. As an alternate history, it’s atrocious. As a romance, it’s cringe-worthy. As a poignant bildungsroman that poses tough questions, it fails utterly. As a self-contained, standalone novel, it is a disaster—but that, at least, was always the plan. Part I: World-Building We find ourselves in a harsh desert. Once this land was ruled by the largely peaceful Scholar people, but they were overrun by the brutal Martial Empire. The Martials spend most of their time killing things and training to kill things, unlike the Scholars, who like books. There are especially scary Martial soldiers called Masks, who wear silver masks that have melded to their faces because they never take them off. Naturally, there is an underground Scholar resistance movement, called the Resistance, and they live in constant danger. There are also some nomads who hang around with the Scholars sometimes. They have no purpose in the plot. Such heavy-handed naming has not occurred in a work of fiction since Pilgrim’s Progress. From the marketing—and maybe a few throwaway clues in the actual book—we gather that the Scholars are based on the medieval Arabs. Or maybe the ancient Persians. Or maybe the ancient Jews. Or maybe the Celts. The Martials seem to be Romans with Nazi sprinkles. All the characters are atheists, which is about as far from ANY real-life ancient culture as you can get. The Martials borrow the Roman symbols of eagles and laurels, which is stupid, because these symbols have no meaning separated from Jupiter and Apollo, or whatever Megan Whalen Turner-style proxy gods these characters could have had. Tahir doesn’t write out the supernatural entirely though. There’s a random djinn running about who does absolutely nothing. She also doesn’t stick to the naming conventions of the cultures she’s supposedly inspired by. Martials have Hebraic names—Elias, Hannah, Zachary—and Scholars have Celtic names—Keenan, Darren. In sum, what we know about the Scholars: •They’re oppressed. •They like books. Don’t ask what kind, because we don’t know. •They are atheists, because they are Above All That Primitive God BS. •They are resisting their oppressors, and they have very cleverly named their resistance The Resistance. •They have a moon festival or something with pretty lights and dancing in the town square. The festival is an important plot point, as it allows our heroine to get incredibly horny dancing with two different boys. •They have dark hair and dark eyes, except when they have blond hair and green eyes. This sounds like the merging of two historically separate ethnic groups, but such a backstory would actually interest intelligent readers, so Tahir doesn’t go there. This is what we know about the Martials:
•Pretty much all of them are soldiers.
•They really like killing things, up to and including ten-year-old boys.
•Other than slaughtering whatever living thing happens to cross their path and terrifying the populace, they have no interests or customs.
•Actually, scratch that. They also enjoy raping, maiming and generally terrorizing their slaves.
•They have an Emperor. He’s really far away.
•The Augers are important and they get their knowledge of the future from…somewhere.
•They really like killing things.
•They really like killing things.
•They are atheists, despite believing in auguring. Raise your hand if that makes one ounce of sense to you.
•They can’t be too bright, because there is a resistance group in the desert committing piffling acts of terror and disrespect to the Empire and CALLING ITSELF THE BLOODY RESISTANCE and they have so far been unable to crush it.
•Some of them wear silver masks which mold to their faces. These people are called Masks. Why this peculiar and likely unhealthy custom? I don’t know. I guess that no one’s allowed to question the masks…and that is not the only part of this book that reminds me of Calvinball.
•Oh yeah. They really like killing things.
Everybody on the same page? Great!
Part II: Plot
Our heroine is Laia, a Scholar girl who has never known a world without Martial occupation. Laia and her older brother Darren are orphans, who currently enjoy a peaceful life with their working-class grandparents. Apparently Darren is a rebel, sneaking about learning things he shouldn’t.
As the story opens, Martial soldiers led by a Mask break into the family’s dwelling, violently arresting Darren and brutally killing the grandparents. Laia refers to her grandfather as Pop, which isn’t anachronistic-sounding or anything. The girl (barely) escapes the massacre, and for the first few pages her sorrow and confusion, narrated in that first-person present-tense style so favored today, seem genuine.
Laia wanders about the city and into a catacomb, where she is conveniently taken in by a woman of the Resistance and introduced to the leaders of the movement. One of these is a manipulative middle-aged man whose name escapes me at the moment. Another is a handsome boy named Keenan, who of course objects very strongly to Laia’s presence and spends a good deal of time glowering at her. (Keenan has red hair and freckles and an Irish name, and no one finds this unusual). Laia wrings her hands a lot wondering why he hates her. Everyone who has ever read a book before knows why.
Luckily for Laia, her mom was a leader of the Resistance known as the Lioness (no relation to Alanna), so everyone except (apparently) Keenan accepts and trusts her right away.
The Resistance are trying to infiltrate the local Martial soldier training academy, Blackcliff, which would be a great name for a castle in an eighteenth-century gothic novel but doesn’t really work as that of a military school. They send Laia in as a slave-girl for the brutal female Commandant, who has been known to gouge out the eyes of five-year-old children when they annoy her. Laia will spy for them on the condition that they find and rescue her imprisoned brother.
Here Laia meets Elias, the handsome half-nomad son of the Commandant. He’s in his last year of training as a Mask, and the only member of his class who still takes the thing off his face occasionally. Like all YA male leads today, apparently, he has beautiful grey eyes. He also smells like cloves and rain, as Laia finds out when she gets conveniently injured and needs him to carry her.
Elias’ best friend is Helene, the only girl training at the academy. We’re told Helene is a great fighter, but we are also told far more frequently about her perfect blonde hair and terrific body, which Elias is apparently just noticing now despite having grown up with her. Helene is obviously in love with Elias and becomes instantly jealous of the equally beautiful Laia. Laia, like most slaves , especially those in such a perilous household, is a shrinking violet, but she can’t help but be drawn to Elias, mostly because he smells good.
Elias as narrator is always happy to inform us in great detail about how hot the girls are, but doesn’t connect much emotionally to either of them, or to anyone or anything else for that matter. He has this brilliant plan to run away before he graduates from Mask school—his chances of successful escape are non-existent and his mother will probably literally flay him when caught, but never mind. He has a vague notion that there’s more to life than causing death.
Around now the Augers appear. They say the current Emperor and his line will fail, and the time has come to pick another Emperor, as well as something called the Blood Shrike, which is Tahir’s ever-original way of saying “King’s Champion.” The next Emperor and Blood Shrike will be selected from the top four kids at Blackcliff, because apparently there are no other military schools in this vast Empire: Elias, Helene, some goofus named Zachary, and Zachary’s twin Markus (never mind that the ancient Roman alphabet didn’t have a K). Zachary and Markus are also the token black people in this story. No unfortunate implications there or anything…
They will determine the next Emperor by a series of trials that bend time and space for no discernible reason. These trials show the reader nothing except Tahir’s fondness for shock value (A desert full of corpses! Having to kill all your friends! Elias ogling Helene’s curves while they’re starving on an isolated cliff!) and her lack of world-building skills.
Laia is supposed to spy on the trials for no particular reason. Meanwhile she almost gets raped by Markus a few times, discovers that the Commandant has Wild West style flyers of resistance leaders (including Laia’s parents) all over her apartments, and also that the Commandant made some kind of deal with a demonic something-or-other to ensure that her hated son does not win the Trials.
The Trials aren’t all that time-consuming, because Markus has plenty of time to sexually harass every female in his line of vision, Zack has plenty of time to…do whatever Zack does, Helene has plenty of time to yell at Elias, and Elias has plenty of time to sneak out of the compound and slink around the marketplace disguised as a nomad to flirt with Laia, who doesn’t recognize him. She’s out enjoying the pretty lights festival, somehow having escaped the Commandant for the evening. Whatever he whispered in her ear is steamy enough to be left untranslated.
After they go home, stuff happens, Markus attacks Laia again, Laia gets super sick, Helene heals Laia with her magical healing voice that she just discovered, the Resistance leader pulls a Benedict Arnold, Laia winds up in Elias’ room for no reason and they make out, all the Blackcliff students fight to the death, Markus wins, Zack dies, Helene becomes the Blood Shrike, the Augers want Elias to kill Laia and he can’t do it, and finally E and L escape the city through a secret passage, heading north to where her brother may be imprisoned, assuming he’s not already dead.
Part III: Characters
Laia is far from the worst YA heroine I’ve encountered. Her fearfully disjointed narration at the beginning is actually pretty believable. I appreciated that Tahir didn’t try to make her into a brassy Amazon warrior princess, as we have too many of those. I also appreciated that she didn’t take her to the opposite extreme, making her one of these Bella Swann types who’s always fretting and whining and is hiding an ego the size of Texas under all the apparent self-depreciation; those are the worst.
Laia also has the grace not to describe herself in the mirror. There’s no need, as Elias describes her in unnerving detail every single time he interacts with her. She returns the favor.
But Laia is easily distracted, especially by whatever boy is in the room with her at the moment. I understand that sixteen-year-old girls are boy-crazy, having been one myself, but given all her responsibilities, it seems unlikely—not to mention embarrassing for her—that she spends comparatively little time thinking about her brother, or mourning her grandparents, or pondering what the Resistance claims about her parents.
So she falls far short of Sabriel, Enna of Bayern, or Keladry of Mindelan, but overall Laia isn’t a bad kid.
Elias has a lot of potential—a young man born and bred to do nothing but kill but is willing to throw it all away for love has to have some depth and conflict and all that, right? Wrong. Elias spends most of his time fantasizing about Laia, fantasizing about Helene, and fantasizing about beating the crap out of Markus.
Helene has a brave and loyal façade but underneath is irrational, jealous, emotionally unstable, and disturbingly indifferent to the suffering of anyone not in her special clique. She’s pretty much a plagiarized Annabeth Chase from Rick Riordan’s Greek mythology novels. I didn’t like Annabeth much in her original context, and Tahir’s reiteration of her is about a thousand percent more annoying. And why do both Riordan and Tahir have to mention the character’s beautiful blonde hair over and over again as if it’s a character trait? That gets old real quick.
Keenan is brooding and sulky, and is handsome and has red hair. He might actually be the first redheaded hunk I’ve come across in YA. This is great—I’m sick of redheaded guys always being Ron Weasley or drunken Irishmen. What’s not so great is that the above listed traits are Keenan’s only character traits. He has no discernible interests outside of Laia and the Resistance.
Markus is a one-dimensional hoodlum, and his brother Zack is only there to be a lackey. The other students at Blackcliff are given no development whatever—a monolithic group of boys who spend their money on fights and prostitutes, and are (understandably) terrified of the Commandant.
The Commandant is a sociopath, but conveniently, the heroes can easily outwit her.
The traitorous Resistance leader is so underdeveloped I can’t even remember his name.
There is a djinn flying around for some reason. His name is Rowan, which is odd, considering this story takes place deep in the desert and there can’t be a rowan tree within a thousand miles. He scares Elias and then he flies away. He has no other function in the plot.
Part V: Content Advisory for Teachers, Librarians, and Sensitive Kids Everyone
This book is gratuitously violent, with too many examples to recount here. About ten pages in, a ten-year-old boy is caught deserting Blackcliff and brutally slain by the Commandant. The Commandant brands Laia on one cheek. Laia befriends a fellow slave-girl who had an eye gouged out by the Commandant when she (the slave, that is) was only five. Violence against children is a cheap shock-value gimmick.
During the trials, Elias has a realistic hallucination of walking across a battlefield strewn with the corpses of Laia, Helene, all his friends, and hundreds of innocents, including children. In the hallucination, he knows he has killed them all. We are given a lot of descriptions of the cold, sightlessly staring bodies coated in their dark dried blood.
The climactic battle finds the four nominees for emperor forced to brutally slaughter all their friends in horrifying detail. Markus is forced to kill Zack. Elias is first given the opportunity to kill Helene, then Laia, and cannot do it. Then Emperor-elect Markus tries to force Helene to kill Elias.
Rape is a constant threat, treated far too lightly. Guys are always leering at Laia. At one point Markus forces himself on her, and is only stopped from doing the unthinkable by the arrival of Elias. Markus is also disturbingly obsessed with Helene, and molests her on multiple occasions.
Elias is a hypersexualized being—otherwise known as an adolescent male. While I imagine his perpetual horniness is realistic, it gets to be a drag to read about. He’s either objectifying Laia or he’s objectifying Helene. He makes out with both of them at different times. One of these times he and Laia have all they can do to keep their clothes on. At least Elias doesn’t partake of prostitutes the way all the other boys at the school do—we never actually see this happen, but it is referenced constantly.
I don’t remember Keenan and Laia ever actually kissing, but there’s an industrial truckload of sexual tension between them without any intellectual or even emotional component to render it romantic.
Both sets of characters do a lot of yapping about There Is No God And Religion Is For Losers. However, there are creepy little imps who show up occasionally to frighten Laia (apparently no one else can see them). They are clearly diabolical in origin and have no relevance to the plot.
Also diabolical in origin is that entity that Laia overhears the Commandant talking to. This woman literally made a deal with the devil that her son would die.
Yes, this is just the kind of material middle school libraries need.
Conclusion
An Ember in the Ashes could have been an exciting sword-and-sandals tale with elements from Roman mythology, the Arabian Nights, Caesar’s commentaries, Tacitus, Josephus, and (if done respectfully) the New Testament to create a tapestry of adventure, romance, nobility, and inspiration. Like The Bartimaeus Sequence meets Ben-Hur with just enough Hunger Games elements to keep the masses turning pages. It could’ve been epic.
Instead, she chose to take the superficial trappings of the Romans and the shallowest impressions of the Middle East, and plant them in a sterile world of atheism, survivalism, and desolation.
This world she created is devoid of light, nobility, or heroism. It has no reason. It has no joy. It has no hope. It has no good, simple little people—no Hobbits, if you will—to stand up against its forces of monstrous evil, only a boy and a girl and a boy and a girl and their raging hormones. And there is no Gandalf or Aslan to support them, no cause that they fight for except themselves and their own desires.
At the beginning of this review I compared this to Throne of Glass as a So-Bad-It’s-Good kind of book, but, having taken the time to analyze Ember, I don’t see it that way at all anymore. Throne is also a terrible novel, but it’s campy and silly and frothy, filled with balls and pretty dresses, and kind of fun in its stupid way.
There is nothing fun about An Ember in the Ashes. I’ve never been so dispirited by a book in my life, and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.
