Monday, June 13, 2022

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Final Strife by Saara El-Arifi

 




 Full Disclosure:  This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on June 21, 2022 in exchange for a potential review.  I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.


The Final Strife is the debut novel of author Saara El-Arifi and the first in her "The Ending Fire" trilogy.  The story is inspired by Ghanaian Folklore and Arabian Myths, and features a world in which an Empire was formed by those who supposedly escaped the "Ending Fire" which scourged the rest of the world - an Empire ruled by those who bleed red blood and can wield powerful magic, with the red-blooded oppressing the blue-blooded (literally people who bled blue) and the horrifically maimed clear-blooded who labor for their benefits.  Except a revolutionary group of Blue Blooded people stole Red Blooded Babies from their cribs and swapped them with Blue Blooded ones, and planned to use the Red Blooded Children, raised by the oppressed, to ignite a revolution....only to seemingly fail.  

And so The Final Strife follows two products of that plot - a secretly red blooded girl, raised blue, as our main protagonist as she tries to emerge from despair when the plotters seem to reemerge and a secretly blue blooded girl, raised as the hated daughter of a powerful red blooded noble, who just wants to prove herself worthy.  And so it tells a story of class, race, and weaves in a lot of other themes, dealing also with a tertiary protagonist/large-side character who comes from the third clear-blooded race.  

But honestly, the story is kind of too long, taking far too long to develop to points that the reader knows have to be coming, and spends an awful lot of time setting up for developments and reveals that aren't really that surprising or interesting - and its biggest protagonist is incredibly frustrating by design, and the romance between major characters didn't really work for me.  I can see what the book was doing, and I've certainly seen similar things done well before, but it just didn't come together for me here.  

More specifics after the jump:

-------------------------------------------------Plot Summary----------------------------------------------------
The Empire, the only power that exists over the only land filled with people that exists, has a strict hierarchy: Red Blooded People - the Embers - are the elite, able to wield magic via their bloodwerk; Blue Blooded People, the Dusters, labor as an underclass, and live and are oppressed separately; and Clear Blooded People, the Ghostings, work as silent servants and often slaves, their tongues and hands cut off at birth to punish them for their ancestors rising up in rebellion.  

But years ago, a group of Dusters called the Sandstorm enacted their own plot for revolution:  They broke into Ember households, those with newly born babes, and swapped out the red-blooded babes for blue-blooded ones.  Their plan: to raise the Stolen - the red-blooded babies - as their own, to enter them in and win the competition for Ember Leadership, and to have them then use that power to strike the Embers down.  Sylah was one of those Stolen....but when she made one mistake all those years ago, the Sandstorm and all the rest were cut down, leaving Sylah to grow up alone and purposeless, addicted to a dangerous drug and doing more and more reckless things for a fix.  

Meanwhile, in the home of one of the most powerful Embers, the Warden of Strength, one of those blue blooded babies was secretly allowed to survive and grow up into the young woman named Anoor.  Anoor has spent her life being hated by her mother for what she secretly is, wishing she could prove herself worthy, despite her lack of martial skill and love of reading, even if not super intelligence.  

And so when Sylah comes into Anoor's life, spurred by the seemingly reappearance of the Sandstorm, Anoor decides to do the unthinkable - to enter the trials to become the next Warden of Strength, with Sylah guiding her in exchange for Anoor teaching Sylah how to wield the magical power in Sylah's blood.  But in doing so, both Sylah and Anoor will discover there are a lot more powers in the Empire and beyond than they ever imagined, and find themselves at the center of a storm that could change everything....if it didn't get them killed first.  
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The Final Strife is told from a number of perspectives, with the story leaving Sylah (our biggest point of view character) and Anoor (number two) for others from time to time - with these side characters' perspectives often teasing secrets that are inevitably going to be revealed - such as Ghostling young woman Hassa, who clearly knows more and is up to more than she seems, or fellow Stolen boy Jond, who serves as Sylah's original love interest and has his own secrets due to his affiliation with the new revolutionary Sandstorm.  But for the most part, the reader is stumbling in the dark along with its two main characters, Sylah and Anoor, as they both try to survive, achieve what they think are their goals, and discover truths that make them reconsider everything.  

And well, such a plot relies on Sylah and Anoor being strong characters, and it's there where I'm not sure the Final Strife really works, especially with Sylah.  Sylah is the type of character I've read a few times - a well-meaning girl who has seen how shitty the world is, wallows in her depression (and in her case, got addicted to a dangerous drug that may have permanently damaged her), and when brought out of it by a new purpose in life....makes a constant bevy of bad decisions.  And wow does The Final Strife make those decisions seem bad pretty much right away all the time, even using one of the secondary point of view characters in Hassa - a ghostling girl who wants to help Sylah despite plenty of others telling her its not worth it - to just make it hurt more to keep seeing it....Hassa clearly deserves better from Sylah, and she barely gets anything worth it even by the end of the book....barely.  Now all of this makes sense for Sylah's character, given how her purpose in life was taken from her and how she believed it was her fault, but it's hard to read and it goes on for a long long time.  

Anoor is a bit more typical of a protagonist character - she's privileged but very willing to change her mind once confronted with the truth, very curious and eager to confront her naivete, not athletic or super smart, but also very into books and knowing her strengths and weaknesses, and willing to be creative to achieve her ends.  So it's easy to enjoy her as she both struggles to find ways to win the competition known as the Aktibar, which determines who will be the next Ember leaders, and to find out more about the mysterious map Sylah came across, which suggests that the truth of the Empire's history isn't what is actually told, and that other lands are out there.  Of course even her plot sometimes is difficult, as she deals with parental abuse that gets pretty nasty thanks to her evil hateful mother.  

It's just....Anoor and Sylah's plot arcs just take so so long to develop, as this is not a short book, and as the bad decisions by Sylah rack up, or as the more underlying plot elements and themes are setup, The Final Strife just kind of drags.  And like you can see a lot of things coming from a long way - so you know that Jond and the Sandstorm are going to betray Sylah and backstab her when she least expects it; you know that the revelation of who Sylah is will break up her and Anoor at least momentarily; you know that the Ghostlings will have a hidden truth about the past and the mysterious second continent that Anoor and Sylah will discover, etc.  There are reveals here that are more interesting and surprising, including one subversion I didn't see coming that is very excellently done, but it all takes forever seemingly to occur and it just makes it hard to keep reading.  Then there's the romance between Sylah and Anoor, which you'll see coming a mile away, but didn't really work for me....Anoor's interest in Sylah made sense, but Sylah just goes from having no interest to suddenly realizing Anoor is of interest super quickly after she finally starts to lose trust in Jond, and well it just sort of is something that seems there rather than something that's developed well and naturally.  

Which is not to say The Final Strife is bad.  The story's themes of race and empire are very well done, even if everything is incredibly blunt - well that's not necessarily bad!  The setting is generally well done - I haven't even gone over the murderous wind that comes out at times, which the story hints may be supernatural or not random at times, or the crime lord who is allowed to be a fifth major power in addition to the four official Ember ones as a way of giving hope to the masses for instance.   The story's final act, when it finally starts, works things through pretty well, and it ends on a climax that is very intriguing with some real twists that work pretty well.  I really wanted to like this book a lot more than I did, but I found myself struggling to keep going as things dragged, and it took me longer than usual to finish it.  So I doubt I'll be back for the sequel, although if I do I'll be very willing to DNF it if it doesn't have a much faster pace from the start.  

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