Review: 'An Ember in the Ashes' too much, not enough all at once

4 stars

“An Ember in the Ashes” by Sabaa Tahir was one of the most awaited young adult titles this year — and while it was good, it wasn't great. While it was interesting, it wasn't enthralling. For a top YA book of 2015 and my 50th book of the year, I wanted a little bit more and also a little bit less from this fantasy read.

There's a lot going on here. Elias is a Senior Skull at the Martial Empire’s academy, Blackcliff, where his mother, who abandoned him, is the commandant. He's preparing to desert, but an all powerful leader of their world (Think Twilight's Vulturi) can read his mind and knows his plan. Shortly after graduating, he's chosen to compete with four others in “the Trials” (Think Triwizard Tournament but with less regard for human life), including his two enemies and his best friend, Helene. See what I mean by a lot?

Elias is great. He's clever and compassionate, and he grasps to come to terms with the lives he has taken and will take throughout the book. He cares deeply for human life in general, risking his life and status to protect Laia and refusing to cheer when a deserter is beaten to death at risk of being beaten himself. His mind is a place of conflict, and he fights to understand his feelings for Helene, his ambitions for the future and his desire for this haunting slave, Laia. I find him fascinating, and I loved the chapters in his point of view.

Meanwhile, Laia (I racked my brains for hours trying to remember her name before I sucked it up and looked it up), who is a Scholar that the Martial Empire defeated, goes on a mission to save her brother, who has been arrested for treason. The Resistance, an organization her parents used to lead, agrees to help her if she spies on the commandant at Blackcliff. She agrees, and somehow, stays alive, outliving most of the commandant’s other slaves.

Anyway, she spies on the commandant, and some other things happen with her. I wish she was more interesting. She is not. She’s on a double agent mission for the Resistance, but I wasn’t entirely interested. I didn’t hate her, and I didn’t think she was a bad character. But I wanted to flip past chapters in her point of view more often than I wanted to devour them page by page.

When I was reading all the hype for this book, a less enthused reader compared it to “Game of Thrones.” But not as good. I think that would be an excellent way to describe it.

This read is violent. Many people die with hardly a second thought. There's a decent amount of blood spilled in the first chapter with hardly any guilt. There are a lot of plots and subplots — the fey, for example, are returning from exile to take over the world, the Resistance isn’t quite what Laia thought it was and there’s a possibility Laia’s mother was actually evil. But because this is part of a series instead of a standalone novel, most of those subplots were just barely mentioned. And the love triangle-rectangle-polygon is completely nonsensical and kept my head whipping back and forth at every new chapter.

(While I’m complaining, I'm putting in a formal request for a newly released young adult novel that isn't part of a series, damn it. Someone, give me a suggestion.)

Sounds GoT-y enough. But where GoT pulls off being way too much all at once, “An Ember in the Ashes” did not pull it off for me. Not completely.

Will I read the next book in the series? Yes. Will I wait until it goes on sale or comes out in paperback before I buy it? Probably. I can wait.

If you liked "An Ember in the Ashes," something tells me you'd also like "The Wrath and the Dawn" and "A Song of Fire and Ice," the series of novels that "Game of Thrones" was based on.