Thursday, March 10, 2022

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Ivory Key by Akshaya Raman

 




The Ivory Key is the first in a Indian inspired YA Fantasy duology by debut author Akshaya Raman.  The story features a country known for its ability to excavate physical magic from its mines, a country that is falling apart due to foreign pressure, internal poverty, and the secret decline in magic.  In that country the story follows a family of four royal siblings, children of a father who once dreamed of a long lost artifact that could unlock other sources of magic but of course never found it - leading the protagonists to believe it just a myth, until their own individual goals lead them to go on a desperate quest to find it themselves.  

Unfortunately, the result is very meh, and not particularly interesting, even if it's done competently enough.  The book is not very long, and tries to feature four main characters with their own points of view, along with a country and geopolitical situation and long lost myths and well....books that try to do all that generally can work by focusing on certain elements, like 1-2 specific characters, and to develop them well while leaving the rest underdeveloped.  Instead, The Ivory Key tries to develop all four characters, as well as the world to some extent, and as a result they all feel underdeveloped, like stock characters, and the plot really doesn't hit any surprising or truly interesting plot beats to make carrying on further with these characters feel worth it.  It's not bad in any way, it's just meh, which makes this hard to recommend with so much else great out there.  

----------------------------------------------------Plot Summary-------------------------------------------------------
The Country of Ashoka is known for its control of a unique resource: its quarry of magic, which it has historically mined and used to build a prosperous country through both the magic and the value it can return through trade with other countries.  But secretly, the quarry of magic has been drying up, resulting in disaster for the country: the threat of invasion from a former trade partner greedy for magic as well as the internal poverty of Ashoka itself.  And the assassination of the last Maharani of Ashoka, supposedly at the hands of her mixed-blood stepson, has only thrown things further into unrest.  

That assassination elevated Vira to the role of Maharani, where she struggles to balance her personal wants with her need to protect the country and placate its powerful Councilors.  Meanwhile, the accusation of her brother Kaleb for the murder resulted in him being placed in the dungeon.  Vira's twin brother Ronak couldn't care less about the country, but finds himself bargaining with a dangerous criminal for the means to free Kaleb and to escape palace life.  Meanwhile, sister Riya ran away two years prior in disgust at how the nobles were ignoring the plight of the commoners and became the member of a rebel group.  

The four siblings couldn't be any farther apart at a time the country is falling apart.  But when the murder of Vira's political betrothed reveals a possibility that the Ivory Key, a long lost artifact that could unlock new sources of magic, may actually exist, they find themselves coming together for their own reasons to search for the Key before it may become too late.  But the path to the key is guarded by a deadly secret society, and finding it will require the four to cooperate for the first time in years....and to avoid their secrets tearing each other apart....
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The Ivory Key is the story of Vira, Riya, Ronak, and Kaleb, with the story alternating between their perspectives from chapter to chapter mostly.  Each of the four characters follows a fairly classic character archetype: in Vira you have the eldest, with rule thrust upon her so soon, who wants to do what seems impossible, and become a good ruler despite a council to appease and a country falling apart for reasons she can't reveal, resulting in her being seen as cruel; in Kaleb you have the mixed-race prince distrusted for his other blood; in Ronak you have the prince who desperately just wants to get away from it all and be free; and in Riya you have the royal who saw how the commoners were suffering and couldn't stand it, so she ran away to become one of them and to fight the royalty for the poor.  You also have a lot of other common plot archetypes - the council of powerful nobles who Vira must assuage to keep her rule; the dangerous criminal who is offering dangerous bargains to Ronak in exchange for freedom etc.  The story is Indian inspired, so the world features Indian words for royalty instead of European ones, but the story itself hardly feels like anything different from more European inspired fantasies in its plot and characters.  

And well, really that's the problem here: this book doesn't really feel unique in any way from its characters to its plotline.  Each of the four main characters I described above is barely more than those archetypes I described in a single sentence, and even where they diverge they do so in more typical ways, like Vira falling for her non-royal and somewhat secretive bodyguard (guess how that ends).  The country itself just feels like an archetype, with its council and other minor nobles, some of whom are given names and small moments and then disappear as irrelevant, just seem to lack any unique personalities.  And well, we don't really spend much time, even with Riya, among the poor and suffering, to really see how the country is actually going downhill...we're just told it and expected to care.  Even the magic system, tied to physical objects, isn't really shown or explored, so when a revelation occurs in the final act regarding it, it's just like "oh that was supposed to be a big deal?  I guess?"

I suspect the biggest problem here is that this is a short book, and well, there just isn't enough space for it all - to develop the struggle of this country, to develop each of the four main characters, or to develop the side characters.  The book instead tries to develop everyone equally and the result is that there isn't a single character who I wound up caring about much at all.  Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with the book - it's utterly inoffensive, the plot is fine, and the Indiana Jones like adventuring scenes in the second half are executed well enough, so the book never drags.  But well, the book is more interested in setting up those Archeological-type adventure scenes in the back half to actually develop the characters or the world and it shows.  Even the book's cliffhanger ending is one you'll see a mile away.  

So yeah, the Ivory Key is fine, and it's short, and you're not likely to actively hate it.  But well, I usually start these reviews by talking about the good features of books, the ones that stand out, and really there's nothing here to mention.  It's just another book, one that doesn't really have anything to stand out, simply because it tries to have it all and thus doesn't have enough time for anything.  The result is that this is one duology whose ending I'll wind up skipping.  

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