Wednesday, January 20, 2021

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Ruinsong by Julia Ember

 



Ruinsong is a dark YA fantasy story by author Julia Ember, being a novel inspired but very different from the Phantom of the Opera.  Featuring a F-F romantic pairing at its heart, the story takes the opera-house setting of the classic play/novel and makes the opera a house of horrors, where magical singers in the country put on a performance to torture the noble class through their magic every year.  It's a story featuring class differences between three classes - mages, commoners, and nobles - and people struggling to figure out how to live and how to resist a cruel regime led by a Queen who is more interested in revenge upon her former enemies than it being a good ruler.  

And Ruinsong works to a point, making it worth your time if you can handle its darkness (See the Trigger Warnings below).  The slow burn F-F romance works really well, as does the main storyline showcasing a member of the regime, forced to commit horrible acts, struggle to find a way to resist while knowing the consequences as she is confronted her love interest (the co-protagonist) who wants her to more actively resist.  But the story isn't quite long enough or in-depth enough to deal with its themes of class, and so it doesn't quite work as well there.  Still, for it's length and its characters, this is a very solidly done fantasy story that will be worth some of your time.

TRIGGER WARNING:  Animal Cruelty (Dog Murder) and Torture.  This is a dark story, and the antagonist makes one of the protagonists torture people for her purposes, and is willing to do anything to ensure her compliance.  This might be too much for some people (again, Dog Murder is pretty bad).  

Note: I read this as an audiobook, so if I misspell any of the characters or concepts below, that's why.  The audiobook reader is very good with both main characters' voices, so I would recommend this book in that format.

------------------------------------------------Plot Summary-----------------------------------------------
When Cadence was a little girl, an orphan taken in by the school for singers - the mages of Cavalia - her only friends were her little dog Nip and the noble girl Remi, who would spend time with her whenever her family visited the Palace.  But then Queen Elene took the throne and everything changed.  For Queen Elene is a Singer herself and she hates the nobility who once broke her heart....and she intended to make sure the nobility was put into their place.  And so the Queen took Cadence from the school to be her personal singer....to use her magical talents to torture the Queen's enemies among the nobility - threatening to dispose of Cadence and all Cadence cared about if she didn't comply.  And Remi disappeared from the palace, as the nobles fled the city and the Queen's wrath.  

Years later, Cadence is now a young woman, and has been announced as Queen Elene's Principal - her strongest corporeal mage, with songs capable of healing grave injuries....or flaying humans alive.  Threatened with having her vocal chords - and her magic - cut, Cadence doesn't dare disobey the Queen, even as the Queen asks her to torture an entire opera house of nobles to send a message of their standing. 

But when a chance encounter brings the now grown Remi back in her life, Cadence begins finds herself longing for the other girl, and the feeling is mutual.  But Remi pushes for Cadence to take a stand against the Queen for the sake of everyone in Cavalia, and Cadence must find what she has in herself to raise her voice in resistance....
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Ruinsong is a story that switches off between the perspectives of Cadence and Remi, although the book is not afraid to feature multiple chapters in a row from the same character's viewpoint.  The two characters are very different and yet they both find something in each other - not just their beauty but their inner kindness and caring.  Remi comes from the noble class, and her mother fell sick due to one of the Queen's Torture Performances, so Remi comes in her place, dreading it all the same, but knowing she has to do her duty.  Cadence unlike Remi has everything she could want...all the riches of the palace, except that the Queen forces her to commit atrocities, under threats of losing her voice or her life or anyone she dares to care about...and the Queen's head justicar is a sadist who would be happy to do the deed.  

The result is that the two have very different views on the world.  Cadence lives in fear for herself, and for those she cares about, but she lives alone in relative comfort, and so the Queen's horrors are more a moral concern for her - one that hurts her inside emotionally and drastically, but the consequences of her actions are limited in scope.  It's thus possible for her to convince herself that she must go along, that if she doesn't Elene will just fine someone else to do the horrors instead, and that she can try and limit the damage.  But for Remi, who sees the suffering of so many from the outside, who no longer lives in comfort with the nobles in disgrace, she knows such a thing cannot be allowed to stand.  And the book does a tremendous job showing how hard it is for Cadence to resist and why she is so afraid of doing so, of how the personal costs to her, even if not as bad as the societal costs that Remy faces, explain her fear, and in making the plot work as she slowly resolves to find a way to fight back.  

Naturally Cadence and Remi have a romance develop between them, but in a really smart move, this is mostly one of physical attraction at first, one which neither is willing to act on for fear of being wrong about the signals the other is giving off (and Remi is afraid due to the noble stigma of same sex relations, whereas commoners and mages have no such stigma to affect Cadence).  I was afraid at first the story would have the two more clearly fall in love before the resistance plot and rush the relationship, but it forms really naturally and never consumes the rest of the plot.  

Working less well is the book's dealing with class.  The book creates a world where the nobles previously oppressed both the mages and the commoners, until Elene led the mages to rise up, while the commoners didn't care because they hated the nobles too - only for Elene to turn out as bad for the commoners with her surveillance state as the nobles were.  And so it tries to show that the nobles weren't the greatest before, and how the commoners need to have a say....but it just doesn't have enough page length (or hours for the audiobook) to actually show this class conflict, which comes to play a major part in the conclusion and instead just feels thrown in and kind of silly with it all.  

Still both the romance and the struggle to choose to resist inside a surveillance state (of magic) in which one isn't quite in much danger if one complies with the regime - all put into a setting featuring magic based upon music - is done well enough that i can recommend this book to YA readers....if they are willing to handle the book's dark themes of torture and worse.  It's worth it if you can deal with them, even if the book doesn't quite fulfill all the potential it poses.

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