Because this is the fourth and final book in the Ember in the Ashes series, you must start at the beginning. I highly encourage you to, but this is not a story to begin lightly. It is deep and dark and a raw tale of war and redemption. It will take you to the edge.
I’m not sure I truly want to summarize what happens. If you’ve made it to the fourth book, then you already care for Laia and her love of the Scholars, her people, and her love of the Soul Catcher who was Elias. You know what the Soul Catcher gave up and what he is now required to do, loosing himself in the process. You know Helene, the Blood Shrike and aunt of the future emperor, whose city was lost at a staggering cost. And you know the Nightbringer, whose pain is endless and who has allied himself with the bloodthirsty Keris Veturia. You know the destruction that must be coming.
This book crushed me. There are some moments of beauty, yes, and I found the end to be exactly the kind of satisfying that a series like this would require for me to finish with my heart intact. But the road there is an emotional one, where we are forced to tabulate the true cost of war, the way that cruelty and loss can either twist and break a person - or become the path to mercy and compassion. The world building here is really complex, to be honest, sometimes I had to just move forward not completely understanding some of the nuance - and it came in time. By the time I got near to the end I was on solid ground but there is deep magic and death personified and creatures of time and fire and an ancient story that must be told, a lot for my brain to sometimes keep straight. While occasionally I could've done without the more in-depth technicalities of war craft, it wasn't enough to be frustrating and throughout the narrative and I was surprised and mortified and desperately sad. I particularly loved the arc of Helene, she is one of the most complex and resilient characters I have ever had the pleasure of spending time with - and I read A LOT.
This book (and the whole series really) is about not just what humans are capable of, the depths of the pain we can inflict on each other in the name of war or vengeance. It is also about what humans can survive, what a heart can swell to forgive or to understand, what it can choose even after being broken and the way it can continue pumping even after all it has loved is lost. I finished feeling, surprisingly enough, very similar to how I felt at the end of the Harry Potter series. It was as though I’d been taken to an incredibly intense emotional brink, but brought back with the care of a great writer who never made me feel like the pain I felt in the reading was gratuitous or to shock me. It was to help me dig into our shared humanity and, in the end, know a little more deeply, what kind of world I want to live in, the kind of world I’d fight to defend.
NOTE: the readers of this audio book are WORLD CLASS. Phenomenal. I highly, highly recommend listening to this astonishing story, from beginning to end :)
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