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Tirzah's Reviews > Raybearer
Raybearer (Raybearer, #1)
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This book was awesome! It starts out a little bit off-center, you're not sure what's going on or what world you're in. There are demons in this world, and danger, and magic, and power and revenge, and a king- these things swirl around the young Tarisai, with rhythm and texture that beautifully set the stage for what's to come.
I listened to the audiobook, and the narrator did an amazing job with the music/chanting in the story. It added something really cool to the experience, an element of the world building you couldn't get the same way just from reading. The world this book inhabits resembles a sort of pre-modern pan-African empire, something like you could imagine for our world if Europeans hadn't been the imperialists. In fact, the story centers on an empire, and my mind pictured it as an empire centered in Africa, with tendrils curling out to areas of the world similar to Europe- lots of different peoples and cultures, but an African empire at the center.
It's hard not to conceive things like this in analogies, but I like that this story really has nothing to do with any of the geopolitical pains of our own history. But this has its own, and as Tarisai leaves the place she was born and travels to the very center of the empire to attempt to become one of the future emperor's closest council members- the whole world starts to unfold for us with her. As she starts to see and question the empire, so do we.
The council she is attempting to join will all be psychically linked, as all emperors for years have been, with 12 others- this connection is called the ray. The empire wants people for the ray who have special talents- essentially, magic. Tarisai can see people's memories when she touches them.
The exciting and compelling and totally interesting twist- which happens right away in the book, so it isn't a spoiler- is that Tarisai's enigmatic, powerful mother "The Lady"- puts a kind of curse on Tarisai, so that when she is accepted into the Ray, she will have to kill the emperor.
This is a propulsive and fascinating device for the entire book. These characters are amazing, and there are twists in the book that took me for such a ride. It's a really exciting world to spend time in, and I can't wait to read the sequel!
I listened to the audiobook, and the narrator did an amazing job with the music/chanting in the story. It added something really cool to the experience, an element of the world building you couldn't get the same way just from reading. The world this book inhabits resembles a sort of pre-modern pan-African empire, something like you could imagine for our world if Europeans hadn't been the imperialists. In fact, the story centers on an empire, and my mind pictured it as an empire centered in Africa, with tendrils curling out to areas of the world similar to Europe- lots of different peoples and cultures, but an African empire at the center.
It's hard not to conceive things like this in analogies, but I like that this story really has nothing to do with any of the geopolitical pains of our own history. But this has its own, and as Tarisai leaves the place she was born and travels to the very center of the empire to attempt to become one of the future emperor's closest council members- the whole world starts to unfold for us with her. As she starts to see and question the empire, so do we.
The council she is attempting to join will all be psychically linked, as all emperors for years have been, with 12 others- this connection is called the ray. The empire wants people for the ray who have special talents- essentially, magic. Tarisai can see people's memories when she touches them.
The exciting and compelling and totally interesting twist- which happens right away in the book, so it isn't a spoiler- is that Tarisai's enigmatic, powerful mother "The Lady"- puts a kind of curse on Tarisai, so that when she is accepted into the Ray, she will have to kill the emperor.
This is a propulsive and fascinating device for the entire book. These characters are amazing, and there are twists in the book that took me for such a ride. It's a really exciting world to spend time in, and I can't wait to read the sequel!
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