Such a fun book! The story is told through two perspectives: Laia and Elias. Laia is a slave whose grandparents were just murdered in front of her and whose brother was just arrested for treason. Laia barely makes it out alive and only has the rebels to turn to for help. In return for helping her, she makes a deal to infiltrate the Empire’s greatest military academy as a servant for the most sadistic leader working there. Elias is unhappily the school’s best soldier-in-training and will soon graduate if he doesn’t run away first. Eventually their stories connect and they work together to make a future that allows them freedom.
This could easily have been trite or boring, but Tahir brings a fresh viewpoint to this kind of story. The writing is good, the characters are well-written, but Tahir’s greatest strength is her gift for plot. I tore through this 446 page novel in just a couple of days because I couldn’t wait to see what would happen next. The story was unpredictable, but was clever and made sense after the fact. Tahir managed to wrangle the many story threads into something compelling and understandable.
I was a little lukewarm on the romance aspect of the book (like I am with many other YA books honestly). At least it was a love square instead of triangle this time which made it more interesting. Also, the members of this love square were all interesting characters with realistic motivations. That automatically puts it above many ya romantic storylines. Not that I’m against ya or romantic storylines, it’s just that there tends to be a lot of handwringing over nothing. Not the most compelling.
Still, this book was well worth reading and I’d highly recommend it to anyone into fantasy or dystopian fiction. The story was cracking and I can’t wait to see where the sequel goes.