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Hello by beautiful watchers, it is your boy Dominic Noble,
back at it again with the book reviews. Uh yes that actually felt very natural,
I‘m definitely going to make that my opener from now on. Anyway let's talk about Raybearer.
Published August 18th 2020, Raybearer is the first full novel from american author Jordan Ifueko and
encompasses the first very eventful 20 years or so of the life of a young lady called
Tarisai in an african inspired fantasy empire in the magical world of Aritsar.
I’m about to put a lot of words in the author’s mouth, I do have citations for all of it but
if I accidentally misrepresent her original meaning, apologies in advance.
Noticing that most famous fantasy settings tended to be extremely eurocentric, and as the daughter
of two Nigerian immigrants, whose ancestry traced back to different tribes within the nation,
Ifueko wanted to tell the story of a fictional kingdom that reflected her heritage instead.
In interviews she’s talked about trying to find the balance between making it clear she’s taking
influence from african culture and making it a unique world with its own customs and history.
Interestingly she apparently faced pressure from publishers to make it
recognizably more african as that was how they’d chosen to market it.
Ifueko is apparently the chosen one of authors because she was head hunted by a
publishing agent who was impressed with her short stories. When he asked her if she had
anything else to show him she sent him the first few chapters of a novel that she’d
been working on since she was thirteen years old, the book that would eventually become Raybearer.
So getting right down to the biscuits,
this book is really really good you guys. It was another unexpected hit that kind of blew me away.
For starters this is some Anne Mccaffrey/GRR Martin level worldbuilding, both in the
fascinating depth of the world created and how naturally the exposition is worked into the story.
Themes include challenging the mindset behind history’s treatment of women, found families,
devotion, overcoming hate with love… And fighting DEMONS, both psychological and literal.
Lemme give you the history of the setting, the Arit empire, because
well honestly just because its really cool.
There were once 13 kingdoms on distant, separate islands,
all with their own distinct cultures and practices.
The one thing they all had in common was they were plagued by attacks from Abiku, terrifying demons
and spirits from the underworld laying waste to their nations and slaughtering their people.
Eventually a noble ruler of one of the most powerful kingdoms, a gentleman by
the name of Enoba, connected the islands into a supercontinent using unbelievably powerful magic
and through either military might or diplomacy conquered all but one of the other nations.
Enoba then used his united empire to fight the armies of the underworld to a standstill,
until they agreed upon a harsh but bearable peace treaty.
His descendants then ruled for.. I think hundreds of years I couldn’t quite figure out the exact
timeline, supposedly by divine right, as proven by the continued display of magical powers.
An example of which is their unique form of protection. For every close friend that he
anoints to his inner council, the emperor or crown prince gains an immunity to some form of death,
violence, fire, poison, falling, that sort of thing. Once he has one person sworn to
him from each of the eleven nations under his rule he is immune to everything except old age.
It's not as simple as it sounds, as
for the ceremony to work each council member has to genuinely love him.
It can be romantic, or platonic but he has to work to forge relationships with each of them.
This is usually arranged by the preceding emperor recruited a ton of hopefuls at a very early age so
they grow up with his young prince as a close knit family.
As mentioned the protagonist of the story is a young woman named Tarisai.
Her mother is a mysterious, powerful figure known as The Lady,
who wishes to assassinate the Emperor's heir to end his line.
It’s of course a bit hard to kill someone who’s immune to everything
but there is a loophole she hopes to exploit as the emperor has
no magical protection whatsoever if the attack comes from one of his beloved councilmembers.
So, as you can guess, the plan is “magical sleeper agent”. She captures an ehru, basically a genie,
bound to grant wishes to his master, and forces him to conceive a child with her,
who being half ehru inherited the compulsion to grant her mother a wish.
The lady has her daughter raised to be intelligent, skilled, kind and
completely ignorant of the plan, then when she’s 10
she uses her wish to program her to kill the crown prince Dayo when he truly loves her and
lets his guard down before sending her off to audition to become one of his counsel.
I’m going to try and leave it there when it comes to the plot because I really want you guys to read
this book, but you can probably deduce that Tar desperately trying to fight her magical
programming and not be forced to kill is a big recurring plot element of the rest of the book.
But seriously, please read this book, do it for me my beautiful watchers. I don’t play
this card often but I suffered through the entire Twilight Saga for you, you OWE me.
Another fun aspect of the world is people’s hallows,
I hesitate to make this comparison because it really doesn't do it justice but
the easiest way of conveying the concept is: it's a bit like the quirks in my hero academia.
Some people are born with unique superhuman abilities. One person can fly, another can force
you to tell the truth, one fascinating character called Kirah can sing things into existence.
Tarisai’s hallow is the ability to touch people's memories through physical contact.
She can see them, take them, give you some of hers. It also works on objects so she can
draw stories out of people’s belongings or from the ground itself if needs be.
There’s a funny moment where she’s trying to read the history of an ancient drum that's been
in storage for centuries, and she’s like “Gah… sorry most of its memories involve spiders”.
Prince Dayo, as a fictional character, turned out to be fascinating to me because based on his
archetype I would have expected not to like him, but I did. The archetype in question being he’s
so freaking nice, and progressive and trusting and pure he’s clearly too good for this world.
In my experience this kind of wonderfully nice character is very prone to being one dimensional,
tropey and cliche yet somehow it kinda just works for this guy,
probably because it's a rare case of these potentially annoying aspects
being pretty well balanced with other character flaws and noticeable character development.
It also would have been so easy for the story to treat him as a macguffin,
the reason Tar does the heroic things that she does like a gender flipped knight and
personalityless princess but that too is avoided, he’s a character with his own agency and arc.
He’s also not naive which helps a lot. His belief in people’s goodness comes
from his indomitable spirit, not a lack of world experience.
The predictable trope of him being set up as a sweet cinnamon roll in the first act only for
him to fall from grace as he gets jaded over time showing that he was only nice in the first place
was to add some element of tragedy to his villainy is completely sidestepped as well.
I don’t think he’d make a very good protagonist but
as a supporting cast member he worked quite nicely here.
Ok so, fun fact, your boy Dom absolutely detests love triangles, I am so done with them, so when
I thought I saw one developing in this story I was gripped with an inescapable sense of dread.
Tar and Dayo grow to be crazy close, and while she insists they’re just friends everyone around them
just nods and winks in the “oh yeah, well we’ll see when you’re older” kind of way, but wait,
Tar develops feelings for Sanjeet, one of the other council members.
Oh gods here it comes, here comes the bloody love triangle… But no. Dayo comes
out as being romantically and sexually ace and is perfectly happy for Tar and Sanjeet,
proving they really were just friends and all the smug fantasy shippers were just plain wrong.
So blessedly spared the love triangle AND asexual representation. Hallelujah.
Each one of the 13 nations in the story is based on an actually african region. Ifueko mentioned
in one of her interviews that it was really difficult to find unbiased historical information
about them... because in recent centuries a bunch of European nations, (especially Great Britain)
colonized the shit out of them and intentionally erased almost all of their history and culture.
In a stroke of genius, she ended up turning this to her advantage and using this kind of
erasure in her story. A big conflict of the book arises from the dominant empire trying to force
unity and assimilation on its vassal states by destroying their written history and storytellers.
The Lady is yet another fascinating character. I thought
she was just going to be a hate sink but she got seriously nuanced as the story went on.
Unfortunately no matter how sympathetic she becomes
she’s still a very realistic depiction of an abusive, highly manipulative parent.
She never uses her daughter's name, only referring to her as Made of Me,
it becomes very clear she only sees her as an extension of herself.
Every very justified complaint Tar makes towards her is flipped and
used to make TAR feel guilty and forces her to beg for forgiveness.
You learn this is very much a cycle of abuse that she picked up from her childhood, but
fortunately it's broken by one of the other major themes of the story which
is the love and support that can come from the family that you choose.
Ok next super cool but kinda dark world element:
the treaty with the underworld. The terms were rough, I’m not gonna lie.
Every year 300 children are (supposedly) randomly chosen and magically marked
with blue maps that appear all over their bodies. These children have been selected
to be “Redemptors” which is a cool sounding word for human sacrifices.
At age 10 they have to jump into a rift in spacetime into the underworld,
to satisfy the Abiku’s desire to torture mortals.
The maps on their bodies can potentially lead them back to the land of the living
but very few make it and those that do are haunted for life.
Avoiding going into spoilery detail but:
there's a twist to this whole thing that makes it even more unpleasant and suspicious.
There’s a battle scene in this book that I want to gush about briefly because
as a basic nerd bro I do love me a good battle scene and Ifueko just has that surprisingly rare
ability to write a damn good battle scene, urh this book is so go its almost offensive.
Its very easy to write underwhelming or unengaging battles, you can either take
too much of an overview leaving the reader feeling disconnected from it,
or you can make it too personal, and leave them feeling like they might as well have read
a one on one fight for all the awareness they have of the goings on around them.
Really good authors, like one of my personal favorites: Burnard Cornwell,
find that wonderful balance of writing from the perspective of someone
who has personal shit to do butare also somewhat aware of the thing as a whole.
She also captured the fast paced, confusing, visceral horror of it, and again reminding me of
Burnard Cornwell she included the historically very accurate fact that shit can go from “wow,
this is actually going ok for us” to “oh bugger we are totally screwed” in a single moment.
Ifuko mentioned Gail Carson was one of her influences, specifically The Two Princesses
of Bamarre but you can totally see some Ella Enchanted in this story too, the compulsion to
grant someone's wish being the obvious example along with some fairytale trope subversions.
Rayberer includes some similar themes mentioned in the review of The Charmed Wife,
about how letting go of your anger and overcoming your inner demons instead of
avenging yourself on your tormentor can be the greatest victory you can have over them. And
it was presented in a way less depressing way so that was nice for me.
I loved Tar as a protagonist because like so many other things in this book she hits
the sweet spot of exactly how I like my fictional characters. Flawed but likeable.
She is super admirable, she always tries her best and does really well,
but she’s not perfect. In fact she makes two major mistakes that have terrible consequences.
They’re understandable mistakes, but she has to own them.
I’ve mentioned variations of the word balance all the way through this review and
I really do think it’s the key to success here. You can also see it
in how well the book maintains its worldbuilding while keeping
the personal journey aspect front and center as well, it's almost Ursula K Le Guin level.
Can I also just say how much I love this cover. Give me colour cover artists I’m starving for it.
If going to a bookstore was still a thing I would have been drawn to this like a moth to a flame.
This isn’t a negative as much as it is a “your mileage may vary”.
The story does have an overarching plot but its divided up into different distinct
segments that each have their own short term quests, goals and three act structure.
It's a bit like The Fellowship of the Ring in that way but it's a lot shorter,
so it can feel a little rushed in places. Though like I said, this is not an inherent negative,
you might actually prefer it if you like your plots to keep up a fast pace throughout.
My only indisputable negative isn’t even the author's fault.
Due to past book related trauma, I have been left somewhat hypersensitive to the word
“murmur” and unfortunately this appears to be one of this author's crutch words.
*Murmured sketched idea*
Finally, this book is the first of a series, the sequel, Redemptor,
comes out this august 17th, I’ve already preordered it.
Ifueko went the route of resolving almost all of the plots that she started in this novel
by the end then setting up what the next quest will be about in the final chapters.
I suspect this might have been in case the publishers didn’t jump at a sequel
so we may start seeing more through plots in later novels.
Thank you for joining me, my beautiful watchers don’t forget to do all those
good youtube watcher things like liking, commenting, sharing, subscribing and
checking out my patreon page for more sweet Dom related content.
And again, the thesis of this presentation is: read this book.
If you require further encouragement, how’s about
if you get it and tweet it to me about I’ll give you a crisp digital high five gif. Yeah.
There’s even a way to get this story for free, which
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Once again, thank you for tuning in my beautiful watchers,
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Been hard to concentrate because once again Sir Terry has decided
this is the moment to latch onto my leg. Would you..would you mind? Hey stop that.
If I start randomly doing this on camera..its uh Sir Terry-I moved Sir Terry’s cat tower to just
over here so he’d stop nudging my legs so..its not a weird..thing I’m doing just off-screen.