Wednesday, December 19, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Empire of Sand by Tasha Suri



Empire of Sand is the debut novel from author Tasha Suri, and the first in a new fantasy series drawing largely upon Indian history, epics and myths for its setting.  The book has been very heavily hyped up by the sources I read, so I've been looking forward to it for a while, and my library happily complied by buying four copies.  And well, I intended to read it over the weekend and instead finished it in a single day.

So as you might expect, I enjoyed Empire of Sand quite a bit.  The story features an impressively different main heroine than what you might expect from the cover (the dagger on the front is very misleading) but I really enjoyed her, and the worldbuilding is fantastic.  Add in themes of family, love, the winners and losers of colonization, the conflicts between duties and vows, as well as the power of sacrifice, and there's a lot contained within this book - and yet it all comes together quite well despite the book being just over 400 pages.


-----------------------------------------------Plot Summary--------------------------------------------------
In the Ambhan Empire, the Amrithi people are a diminishing minority.  Hunted once for the power of their blood, which possesses the ability to drive away Daiva, and their magic rituals; now the general people of the Empire mainly don't even believe the Daiva even exist or that the magic was ever real at all.

But Mehr knows otherwise.  The illegitimate daughter of an Ambhan governor and an Amrithi exile mother who left Mehr and Mehr's sister when they were children, Mehr remembers the power of her blood.  Knowing some of the rituals of her mother's people thanks to an Amrithi friend, Mehr hopes to keep those traditions and powers alive, despite the disapproval of her Ambhan stepmother.

But when one of those rituals draw the attention of the Empire's mystics, led by the mysterious Maha at the center of the Empire's religion, Mehr is drawn out from the isolation of her life in her father's palace into a far more dangerous one.  For the Maha intends to marry Mehr off to another Amrithi - a solemn man named Amun - and to use her magical power for his own grand purposes, and the Maha intends to use magical bindings to force Mehr into total compliance.

It will take all of Mehr's wits to find a way to keep her own will in the Maha's Temple, nevertheless to defy him completely.  But if she can't find a way to do that, to break the power of his bindings, the destruction of her people may continue to its ultimate end....
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Empire of Sand is written mostly (about 90%) from the perspective of its heroine, Meir, who is a fascinating heroine in her own strength and beliefs, despite the handicap of her sheltered upbringing and resultant naivete.  Don't let the dagger on the front of the cover of this book fool you, Meir is not an action heroine (the dagger serves a very different purpose than fighting), and Meir's only weapon is her mind and her refusal to accept the fates others choose for her - whether that be her stepmother's attempt to make her forget her Amrithi heritage or the Maha's far darker intentions to bind her to his will.  Meir is a little naive due to her upbringing, but unlike other such heroines in some other books, it doesn't take her very long to shake off that naivete and little seems to shock her as a result of her misunderstandings about the world.

Meir also works as a great example of a character affected by the results of colonization, which is a natural theme of this book.  Meir's heritage is biracial - she's Amrithi on her mother's side and Ambhan on her father's, and while she longs more for her mother's heritage, the fact that she's only half has a clear influence on how others in this book perceive her and are willing to talk to her (it reminds me in a little bit of the heroine of Kate Elliott's Court of Fives).  More bluntly the plot has a conquering people abusing the powers of the conquered to preserve their Empire, as one character blatantly puts it to Meir at one point (alas I can't find the quote right now).  And when the heroine triumphs (of course she does, though I won't spoil how), the book makes clear that the impact of this will have effects not just on Meir's oppressed mother's people, but on the rest of the Empire as well - nothing is utterly clear cut (the sequel will apparently explore this further next year).

The rest of the characters and worldbuilding work fairly well and the plot turns in very different and surprising ways, so I was always ready to read more.  The book has a particularly interesting romance subplot that involved issues of consent in ways that were especially well done - after all, how can one consent when one party is bound by another to perform the acts no matter what and the other party didn't choose to partake in any of this due to a conqueror-conquered relationship?   In a way this reminds me of Aliette de Bodard's In the Vanishers' Palace which dealt with similar issues of consent between master/servant, but this book is less optimistic about the situation.  And it all winds up working out really damn well.

Empire of Sand isn't perfect and has some flaws.  The book on a few occasions shifts its point of view away from Meir to a different character (usually Meir's mentor Lalita, but not always), and these shifts are rare enough to be notable yet don't add enough to feel justified or really that interesting.  There's also the ease in which one major plot point (see below spoiler) gets resolved which makes one wonder how it didn't occur sooner, even if it works in the context of this plot.  Still, this is a really good book overall and worth your time.

Spoiler (in ROT13): Gur znva nagntbavfg, gur Znun, ehyrf ol iveghr bs hfvat zntvpny ovaqf ba gur Nzevguv znva qhb naq zber vzcbegnagyl ol znxvat uvzfrys gur fnivbe bs uvf Zlfgvpf, jub graq gb or becunaf ur erfphrq naq oebhtug hc gb jbefuvc uvz.  Ohg gur Znun vf abg pbireg ng nyy va uvf oehgnyvgl ntnvafg gur Nzevguv naq gubfr jub qrsl uvz, juvpu znxrf vg ernyyl fghaavat ab bar gevrf gb xvyy uvz orsber Xnyvav qbrf gur qrrq.  Nu jryy, V thrff vg pbhyq or whfgvsvrq ol gur Znun orvat znqr jrnxre guebhtu gur evghny snvyvat gjvpr?

In short, Empire of Sand is well worth your time and I will definitely be looking forward to the sequel when it comes out next fall.
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