Empire of Sand and Children of Ruin
Jul. 21st, 2019 01:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearThis week, I finished listening to Empire of Sand by Tasha Suri. It's a fantasy book about a desert-based people, some of whom can control potentially dangerous spirits through mystic rites. The leaders of the society imprison those people and force them to perform those rites to keep the spirits under control. The protagonist, Mehr, is tricked into marriage and kept prisoner at the temple in this role. The audio recording is 17 hours long and it didn't feel as if all that much actually happened. The relationships are all very complex and well-drawn and there's a lot of emotional angst, but it was very drawn out and quite repetitive. However, it kept me listening and the ultimate conclusion was very satisfying. It's about finding hope in adversity, making choices under restrictions and learning to trust and love after a long period of coercion. All of that is presented very effectively and I was certainly invested in the characters, so I'll probably read the next in the series when it comes out.
I also read Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky, the sequel to Children of Time. Again, it was long but not particularly eventful, though there were some periods of unpleasantness scattered throughout. I liked how the humans and spiders of the first book had developed in the interim, and Tchaikovsky is very good at presenting alien intelligences - this book had a further two, both of which are completely different from each other and those that have come before. The slow road to comprehension, communication and diplomacy is well-plotted and I liked where everything eventually ended up. Plus, yay, octopuses!
I also read Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky, the sequel to Children of Time. Again, it was long but not particularly eventful, though there were some periods of unpleasantness scattered throughout. I liked how the humans and spiders of the first book had developed in the interim, and Tchaikovsky is very good at presenting alien intelligences - this book had a further two, both of which are completely different from each other and those that have come before. The slow road to comprehension, communication and diplomacy is well-plotted and I liked where everything eventually ended up. Plus, yay, octopuses!
