Obsidian: Awakening (Book one of Obsidian Series)

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It's established pretty quickly that anything can and will happen, nobody is safe and the characters you begin to latch onto won't be spared.

Obsidian: Awakening had been on my TBR for some time so I jumped at the opportunity to take part in a buddy read on Dom’s Book Club Discord channel. Quotations just aren’t the same out of context, and the characters are so rich, the story so layered and complex! There are some horrific moments but they are amazingly told, and there are instances of such immense poignancy I was hit so many times in the gut while being stirred in the heart. For Hasheem, life has been a serious of circumstances that force him into situations where he is offered the choice to die or give up more of his freedom, and he keeps on giving up more of his freedom, not because he is a coward, and he always wonders how he will regret his decision. The Shakshi were a group of beautiful, athletic desert warriors who expressed excessive honour, causing them to threaten to cut off each other limbs’ (did not actually happen), and fight each other constantly over minor slights.

There had always been fight in that boy when you beat him, hope when there had been no room for hope, compassion even for those who had broken him to pieces.

Inspired by Arabic and Mongolian cultures, the peninsula setting of the Black and White Deserts is so rich and in-depth, and the worldbuilding is weaved masterfully through the narrative. It’s another paradox of Obsidian, how some aspects can be so horrific and brutal and yet so amazingly readable. If we use a George-R-R-Martin-ometer, where ‘ fluffy romantic comedy about cake-baking dragons’ is a One and ‘ murdering your only heroic character at the end of book one’ is a Ten, Obsidian: Awakening is a clear Seven.Im going into spoilers straight away below, but if you love epic fantasy and great writing, pick this up immediately. The prince is impressed by the woman’s bravery and intellect, and decides to make her one of his wives, against the woman’s will. I personally really loved getting the time to get familiarised with the world and characters before everything went to utter shit, because that made all the twists and turns later on hit all the harder.

And even with me hyping it up so much in my head, it still managed to completely blow all my expectations out of the water.There are so many superb examples of clever metaphors and similes which beautifully enrich the descriptions like a desert rose without ever being overly flowery. It was a breath of fresh air to read Awakening with its very different perspective on life and death and hope. My husband, copyediting my blogpost, pointed out that something that doesn’t move and is as large as a prosperous sacred city can’t be hidden without powerful magic (not in evidence yet in this setting). Ghaul came through the prison of Sabha where he was thrown as a child with Muradi, and there and ever since they’ve been what they are.

Jarem is truly, honestly loyal, but he is loyal more to his understanding of what is good for the Salar than to Muradi’s deepest personhood. Who was she to decide that they were no longer her people to protect if they became Rashais, that eight thousand lives were worthless, the moment they stopped representing her ideals? Sometimes, Muradi seems to love him, but both his parents alienate him from themselves but trying to force him onto their side of the war of which one battleground is their ‘marriage’. At Sabha, you did what you were told especially if you hadn’t been through life long enough to grow a spine.

Some books, one can lose oneself in the actual writing, not merely the story, and this was one of those books for me.