Thursday, September 10, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Raybearer by Jordan Ifueko




Raybearer is the debut novel from Nigerian-American author Jordan Ifueko.  It's a young adult novel featuring a world seemingly inspired by a non-Western mythology/setting (neither the marketing nor the acknowledgements seem to suggest a specific culture being the inspiration, so I won't try to extrapolate any further) and it was a novel that I saw a bunch of authors I like hyping up recently when it just came out.  And as it was available immediately as part of the Hoopla Library, I picked it up and read it fairly quickly (it's not a long novel). 

And Raybearer is a fairly solid fantasy debut; the first in a series (trilogy?) but one that ends with a decently satisfying ending.  The main character is really damn good, as a young girl who grows up desperate to both please her mother and to avoid the destiny that mother has enforced upon her, who has a good heart in a world filled with pleasant injustice.  There's also a lot of depth to this world, not all of which gets explored in this novel, to go along with a very solid mix of characters, so I am definitely interested in seeing where things go from here. 


---------------------------------------------------Plot Summary-----------------------------------------------------
Tarisai was raised in isolation in a manor magically concealed from anyone else.  She was raised by an assortment of people, with her only family being the mysterious Lady - her mother - who only appears from time to time and rarely shows any endearment.  Her loneliness is only slightly abetted by Tarisai's special power, her ability to know or take the memories of any person or object she touches and she has longed to be in the outside world.  But when she flees the manor one day, she finds out the truth behind her origins: her mom created her as part of a bargain with an Ehru, for the sole purpose of killing someone.  And finally the day comes when Tarisai is sent away from the manor for that purpose under a specific order from her mother.

But the world Tarisai finds outside the manor is far different than she could have imagined, ruled by an Emperor with the power of the Ray - a Raybearer - who uses his power to tie to him 11 others....and cannot be killed except by one of his eleven chosen.  It's a world where children are sacrificed every year as part of a peace treaty with demons, but the only children so chosen are from an outsider nation, and the Emperor's nation itself is made up of many cultures with their own traditions which the Emperor wants to strictly unite.  And the Emperor's kind son, Dayo, the second bearer of the Ray, is assembling his own council of 11 to impart the ray, a person chosen from every tribe in the country.

Tarisai's order from her mother, an order her blood commands her to obey, means that she must learn to love Dayo and then, once given the Ray and made one of the only ones who could kill him, to kill him.  But Tarisai doesn't want to have her destiny chosen for her, nevertheless one so clearly evil in nature.  But finding a way toward a destiny of her own choosing, to a world of justice, will not come without cost and may not be truly possible.......
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Raybearer is told entirely from Tarisai's perspective, as she grows from a little girl to a young woman by the end (with a few timeskips that are honestly barely noticeable thrown in there).  It's through her perspective as a young girl sheltered from the outside world that we learn about the world - as she experiences it for the first time - and we see the truth for what it really is.  Adult readers - and probably most older YA readers - will see pretty quickly that the world is one filled with injustice in ways that resemble our own world and perhaps in others.  Tarisai may not realize the injustices immediately (although she senses how wrong they are inwardly even when she's persuaded otherwise), but the reader will quite quickly. 

So on a fantastical level, for the Raybearer to obtain his full immortality, he must bind a group of people who love him to him - and I do mean bind, with his council being unable to separate from him for too long without suffering a potentially lethal sickness, and their mind sort of melded to his forever at that point.  But on a realistic level, we have a country filled with a number of cultures which the ruler insists should all meld together - assimilation being his ultimate goal, no matter their own wants and beliefs.....potentially by force.  You have a treaty with demons that requires innocent children to be sacrificed.....and the children supposedly chosen by fate seemingly always are chosen from the same poor people, a people who lack representation in the world.  You have a rule that essentially is patriarchal at the top, with women rejected for any possibility of rule, and where a female council member is sort of expected to provide an heir for the ruler, whether either of them really want it or not.  And while the book isn't fully able to deal with all of these issues - and parts of this setting are left for the sequel to deal with, Tarisai's perspective allows for all these aspects of the world to be weaved together with aplomb, so it never feels like the book is trying to do too much. 

That works because Tarisai and the secondary characters are really damn strong.  Tarisai is arguably an example of the Pinocchio archetype - she's a made girl who wants to be real, with control over her own fate - but unlike the usual version of that archetype, it isn't only love that will allow her to pull that off, but finding a full epic purpose.  She's really intelligent and good hearted, and the love she has for all she sees, especially one fellow member of the council (romantically) and her friends on the rest of it (platonically), really makes her an easy character to root for.  And she finds it hard, unlike her mother, to hate even those she has good reason to - so she can't help despite it all to want her mother to love her, as well as everyone else, and as a result she struggles when she comes across injustices throughout the world that others claim are inevitable. 

The secondary characters again are also great.  Love interest Sanjeet is the big brutish character you would expect to be well, the brute, but instead he wants to use his power to see weakness in others for healing and health, and his reactions to everyone and his and Tarisai's falling for each other is really well done.  Tarisai's best other friend Kirah is a healer who like Sanjeet saw through her childhood the injustices in the world and feels desperate to get out of the trap to change them.  And of course, the prince himself Dayo, is like Tarisai a boy who wants only to do good, but struggles with expectations that suggest he must go in other directions.  He's also an ace character in a world that expects him to provide an heir, which is yet another injustice here, but really works as representation (it is as far as I can tell though, the only queer representation in this novel).  And even the antagonists are really effective, with each having motivations that feel very real (outside of the demons for now, because well they're demons) that make them arguably sympathetic to some degree, even when they do go over the edge. 

It results in a plot that is a really strong ride with excellent plot twists and leads to an ending that is both really satisfying but also leads a lot open - with the injustices of the land laid bare, our heroine setup for a new quest for the next novel, and new potential antagonists on the rise - ones who are set up well and already sympathetic and interesting.  The book has a number of side characters who are never really developed - Other than Kirah, Sanjeet, and Dayo, I have no clue anything about the other 8 members of Dayo's council, which feels like kind of an important oversight (one is mentioned as a gossip but I kind of forgot who she was) - so there's more work to do there for the next novel potentially.  It's one I look forward to either way, to see how this world expands from here. 
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)