Wednesday, February 24, 2021

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: We Free the Stars by Hafsah Faizal

 



We Free the Stars is the sequel to Hafsah Faizal's "We Hunt the Flame" (My review is here) and the second half of her Sands of Arawiya duology.  I didn't quite love We Hunt the Flame as much as others - it won the Ignyte Award for Best YA novel - but I really enjoyed its main two characters, its very strong and deep setting, and was intrigued by its cliffhanger ending, so I was excited to see the audiobook show up on Hoopla as soon as the book was released.  I didn't quite love the first book's central romance, but I was hopeful that Faizal would fix that in the second book.  

And well....Faizal manages to make the romance work a lot better with We Free the Stars after a rough start, and continues doing wonderful work with the setting as she guides the book to a conclusion.  But like the first book, this book features a sequence of reveals and big game changing events in the final act one after the other that feel like unnecessary whiplash, and while the book manages to deal with a dark dark plot featuring a magic book with a mind of its own really well, it struggles to make its other dark moments not feel excessive.  This was a book that I loved quite a lot in some ways and was tremendously frustrated with in others, more than perhaps any I can remember.  

More after the jump.  (Spoilers for book 1 are inevitable, but I'll avoid them as much as I can)

Note: I read this in audiobook and the readers are the same ones as in the first book and they are excellent, so if you want to read this book, I do recommend that format quite a bit.  

-------------------------------------------------------Plot Summary----------------------------------------------------
The zumra did not escape Sharr unscathed, or with their mission fully accomplished.  Their leader, Benyamin fell against the forces of the Lion of the Night, and while they did escape with the Jawarat - the magical book said to be a key to restoring Arawiya's magic - and four of the five hearts of the Sisters of yore, they lost the last heart to the monstrous evil of the Lion of the Night.  And to make it worse they accidentally left behind one of their number, the schemer Altair, in the Lion's clutches.  

In the meantime, the members of the zumra are in disarray.  Zafira feels lost and without purpose, after Dean's death on Sharr, after the touch of Nasir's lips, after the Arz' destruction has left her a hunter without a ground to hunt.  And she has bound herself to the Jawarat, which has a mind of its own, and keeps whispering in her head to use its power for vengeance. 

Nasir himself finds himself with the guidance of his brother, with feelings and magic he doesn't know what to do with, coming back to the land where he is feared as the Prince of Death.  But now he knows that his father was manipulated by the Lion and he has Zafira...if he can just find the words to express how he feels to her.  

And Altair may have been left behind, but he had put so many plans in motion to save Arawiya, plans that he knows could still work.  And if he can just convince the Lion to trust him, he can possibly turn the tables to save everyone.  

But the Lion's return to Arawiya threatens to engulf the country in a new era of darkness and only the zumra can stop him....if they only they can figure out their own emotions and terrors first....
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We Free the Stars is one of both the more enthralling books I've read in quite a while....and one of the most utterly frustrating, doing at least one thing wrong for everything it does right.  Readers of the first book should know that the story is now told from three perspectives rather than two, with Altair's viewpoint joining the main characters of Zafira and Nasir.  And Altair's perspective is a different one than his fellow zumra members - due to a psyche that might not have faced the physical trauma of Nasir, but certainly did the mental trauma due to having a mother who essentially refused to acknowledge him in horror at what he represented...and for who his father is.  But Altair's story, along with Zafira and Nasir's story, starts rather slowly and attempts a head fake as to where his story is going that just seems implausible, before emerging into a really strong narrative of his own.

But the bulk of this story follows Nasir and Zafira.  Again, the story of their romance starts off ridiculously slow and is painful to read.  Nasir is tremendously traumatized and horrible at speaking his mind, but the book plays that to an extreme to the point it's unbelievable, and even throws in an early unnecessary scene with Zafira catching Nasir with his shirt off in the presence of another woman which is not what it looks like - a trope I hate - and Nasir finds himself unable to find the words to explain the situation to Zafira, driving them apart for a short time.  But by the time the story gets to its midway point, the relationship between Nasir and Zafira, now liberated from the shadow of Zafira' s dead friend Dean, works really well and both characters are generally done really well.  

This is especially true with Zafira, who has another complication in her plot this time around: the Jawarat, which whispers in her head...and influences her so she has a hard time letting go of it.  The story of Zafira and the Jawarat, and how both of them change as a result of their bond, is a really dark addition to this tale that actually works tremendously well, as Zafira finds herself confronted by more and more temptations to use power to try and enact revenge and justice.  Add in Zafira's renewed relationship with her sister Lana who has not spent the time away hiding but instead has apprenticed herself to a master healter, Zafira's reacquaintance with her best friend Yasmin, who has lost Dean due to Zafira in book 1, and the loss of so many people Zafira loved due to Nasir's father and you get a tremendous amount of trauma and self discovery for Zafira to try and figure out, and the book does incredibly well by her.  

As for the rest of the characters....it's hit or miss at times.  Nasir isn't quite as compelling as it's easy to understand why he has trouble speaking but it's not quite as compelling an arc for him to just gain the courage to learn to be a leader with his voice (which is kind of his arc...sort of) against the verbal abuse of his father and the Lion.  Lana like I mentioned above is great, as is Kifah, who is revealed to be Ace (both aro and asexual) but just as fierce in her devotion and love to her friends as any of the others, even without romance.  And part of Yasmin's arc and certainly the rest of the setting works really well, as it touches on different cultures, different ways of dealing with grief, on misogyny and oppression and more.  

But then there are moments like the ending, which features a number of twists back to back to back to seemingly try and increase the darkness just before the triumphant ending, which just seem pointless given how quickly each of these moments is resolved or how little time they are given to make an impact.  There are moments like Yasmin's arc, in which she wants to kill Altair and everyone keeps trying to keep her away from him...only for them never to actually meet despite being in the same location repeatedly!  Making that situation even worse is the fact that the book keeps hinting there might be a romantic fit between Yasmin and Altair...despite Yasmin's husband still being quite alive at all these times (even if they're kind of separated at the moment).  There are so many of these moments, which just had me yelling "CMON" as I listened to this book in the car, which threw me out of the narrative in frustration even as I was compelled by so much else in the plot.  

In short, We Free the Stars is the end to what is generally a pretty good duology, but one with so many points that just bothered me enough to knock it down a peg.  There's enough compelling here for me to still recommend it, and for me to keep looking for Faizal's next work, but wow did I wish this was just a bit better so that it could really hit the potential I could feel it had.  
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