Obsidian: Awakening (Book one of Obsidian Series)

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These include but not limited to: torture, hatred, enslavement, prejudice, rape, murder, sexual abuse of children, forced prostitution, genocide. The storytelling is impressively bold, unconventional and intricate, which is exactly what makes this book stand out from the crowd. The power to change the course of history rests in their hands, whether they know it or not, and now they are forced to choose between their duty/destiny and their personal desires.

If you are a fantasy fan looking to explore self pubbed work, I think this is the perfect opportunity. As is the brilliant prose, the complexities of the plot, the richness of the cultures and setting, and the power of the themes and messages. The rest of the book takes place about twenty years later than the first chapter, at a time when - now Salar Muradi, ruler of the Salasar Empire, is considering taking another crack at conquering the rest of the White Desert.She also remembered how Muradi had stood in the middle of the rubble, in a field burnt to ashes littered with corpses you could no longer recognize, staring down at a charred figure of a mother holding her child as though it had been someone he knew, and had seemed to forget she was there entirely. I personally really loved getting the time to get familiarised with the world and characters before everything went to utter shit, because that made all the twists and turns later on hit all the harder. We may die tomorrow for all I know, ‘ Baaku had said, his face softened in the dim light of the tent. Im going into spoilers straight away below, but if you love epic fantasy and great writing, pick this up immediately.

I am not kidding when I say that I read the final 300 pages of this book in one day, because it was simply that compelling to me. There were occasional mentions of the inhabitants of Rashawri being softer than desert dwellers but, in practice, I never really noticed any difference in approach. There are a lot of characters here and the author likes to showcase that there are no really "good" or "bad" ones, no main protagonist or antagonist, everyone is a little bit of both.He mutually fell in love with their mother, a Bharavi, and killed so he could be with her and be the kha’a instead of the then-current kha’a to whom she was pledged. How much you like Obsidian: Awakening will depend on how much you enjoy Sienna’s worldview and unique writing voice. I was hooked from the first few pages by the quality of writing, intriguing premise, the intensity and passion of the character dynamics, and the world Sienna Frost has created. Their beginning descriptions were pretty similar: full of pride and absolute conviction in what they believe, refusing to accept the trauma of their life and everyone else sucks if they do.

Combined with the tense political maneuvering and heady, passionate, love scenes, and simply fantastic writing, there’s plenty in the book to keep the pulse racing, even if the action is not non-stop. This was particularly noticeable with Hasheem, a Shakshi who'd lived most of his life in Rashawri, but who seemed to adjust remarkably quickly to living in Djari's White Desert Kha'gan. It’s not something seen often in fantasy, and I enjoy when authors deviate from the usual/predictable path. The Shakshi were a group of beautiful, athletic desert warriors who expressed excessive honour, causing them to threaten to cut off each other limbs’ (did not actually happen), and fight each other constantly over minor slights.

Who was she to decide that they were no longer her people to protect if they became Rashais, that eight thousand lives were worthless, the moment they stopped representing her ideals? The men were also uniformly hardcore, beautiful-looking, and prone to making expansive speeches about the importance of struggle to forging character. And on top of that, there is also some casual and quiet representation of queer love that I was not expecting, but pleasantly surprised by. From these 300 first chapters, I selected about 30 books (10%) where I wanted to read on, with the intention of only reviewing the books I finished and enjoyed.

In my opinion the author did a great job in teach us readers about these different cultures, their differences and their relationships with each other. What if all they wanted was peace and prosperity, or a chance to live free from the fear of being raided, of not enough food and water, for children to grow up safe and sound behind walls? It's a grimdark novel with a taste of humour, all balanced out, which is where the most appeal lay for me. Mostly, he just tries to stay in the background, not get involved in others’ fights and power struggles, and live. Each of them is powerful and ambitious, yet most of them don’t have complete agency over their actions.It was a toss-up between ‘Genghis Khan with roses and thorns’ and ‘Obsidian: Awakening is NOT THAT DARK’. But there are circles within circles at play and not everything in this world – like the characters - is black and white. But don’t be fooled, they develop their own voices soon enough and that initial sameness and arrogance washes away. As it was, I found it difficult to become invested in any one character as a lot of them were quite similar and then we'd take time away to go and spend with someone else, rather than really building up a smaller group.