by Saara El-Arifi
Pub Date – 6/21/22
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This book is soooo amazing!!
How do you explain this book without giving too much away!!?
The trials to find their new leaders is on. A very deadly and combative test of skills. There’s a underground sect that is threatening to make a move. Power plays that happened years ago replacing important government leaders babies with those of other babies with lesser blood.
The sapphic romance that started off as curiosity as who they were and went to longing and soulmates.
But the part that was destroying me was what they did to those with clear blood. And why they did it. Those with red blood can do bloodwerk magic and are important and all that propaganda BS that societies thrive on. Those with blue blood are ok but are workers and still treated very poorly.
This is colonialism, mass brutal silence, mutilation and brutal killing to keep in their place, not to mention revisionist history being told to the generations after and in a distant alternate universe from ours. But feels familiar in tone and story to atrocities we’ve heard in the past.
Fyi the ripping will stay with me for a long time.
Thank you @randomhouse and @netgalley for the e-ARC for my honest and voluntary review.
Description
In the first book of a visionary fantasy trilogy with its roots in the mythology of Africa and Arabia that “sings of rebellion, love, and the courage it takes to stand up to tyranny” (Samantha Shannon, author of The Priory of the Orange Tree), three women band together against a cruel empire that divides people by blood.
“The Final Strife is the real deal: epic fantasy turned on its head in the most compelling way imaginable.”—Kalynn Bayron, bestselling author of Cinderella Is Dead and This Poison Heart
ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2022—Book Riot
Red is the blood of the elite, of magic, of control.
Blue is the blood of the poor, of workers, of the resistance.
Clear is the blood of the slaves, of the crushed, of the invisible.
Sylah dreams of days growing up in the resistance, being told she would spark a revolution that would free the empire from the red-blooded ruling classes’ tyranny. That spark was extinguished the day she watched her family murdered before her eyes.
Anoor has been told she’s nothing, no one, a disappointment, by the only person who matters: her mother, the most powerful ruler in the empire. But when Sylah and Anoor meet, a fire burns between them that could consume the kingdom—and their hearts.
Hassa moves through the world unseen by upper classes, so she knows what it means to be invisible. But invisibility has its uses: It can hide the most dangerous of secrets, secrets that can reignite a revolution. And when she joins forces with Sylah and Anoor, together these grains of sand will become a storm.
As the empire begins a set of trials of combat and skill designed to find its new leaders, the stage is set for blood to flow, power to shift, and cities to burn.
Book One of The Ending Fire Trilogy
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