Emperor of Ruin

Character: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

Plot: ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆

Prose: ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆

World: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

OVERALL: ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆

This is my review for the trilogy, which I’ve been slowly reading over the last couple of months.

Ashes of the Sun came to my attention sometime during its release in the pandemic for two reasons. Firstly, the gorgeous cover designs, specifically the UK’s choice to have it be in black and white with those striking splashes of red. But most honestly — it was the hand. I can’t get over how much I love it?? It and the whole illustration look so otherworldly and interesting, and when I look at it I grow happy and end up wishing I could draw hands like that; Scott M. Fischer killed it. Secondly, it was marketed on one of my bedrock favourite dynamics — childhood friends-to-enemies, more specifically in the form of estranged siblings. For these reasons the series has been on the back of my brain for at least two years, and I finally took the plunge once I decided I was sick of starting series and not finishing them; I needed to train myself to go do that again, dammit!

And so here we are. That’s two trilogies done this year, now I need to go back and mop up some of the others scattered through my list.

Not going to lie, I thought there would be more interpersonal drama than ended up happening, and that’s deflated some of my opinions. I can’t say which of the siblings I “liked” more, as I found both to be a little … slippery. The easiest to pinpoint a “why” on is Gyre, due to him not really having a character arc in the first book which had unfortunate knock-on effects for me across the second and third entries. I found myself thinking during that book that if I was the editor, I would have axed the prologue and held the reveal that Gyre and Maya were siblings until they met each other again as adults. As it stands, Gyre is always a guy who hates the Twilight Order and is never faced with the hard questions on what if he’s (sometimes) wrong about his position? Maya has this, but not Gyre, and that made me sad.

With Maya, I’m not as sure; I think I just wanted more exploration of what it means to her to be a centarch, as in, inner reflection from her of how she came to the Twilight Order? The story she was told by the Order vs. what Gyre tells her kinda gets brushed over and man, that has so much potential to dig up other aspects to her situation I can’t help but feel there was … I hate saying this, but wasted opportunity here. I thought she had interesting flaws in that she had difficulty accepting the complications of the world/not easily seeing things from other perspectives, something that ends up costing her dearly, but I don’t think she had enough opportunities to interact with outsiders and show this characterisation to its fullest potential, as the people she mostly interacts with are either those within the Twilight Order, or enemies she’s out to slay.

As for other characters, Kit annoyed me very much in the first book due to her Manic-Pixie-Dream-Girl characterisation, but it did get better in the next two books once she had more people to dilute her page time. Varo was also fun with his stories about all his friends that either die or are awfully mutilated on the job. I also found the main antagonist of the series to be … okay. I don’t mind how he’s just some bad guy that needs to be dealt with, but I wish we got to see more of how his presence impacts the characters than ended up happening; one of my complaints with Emperor of Ruin are the flashbacks, the information of which I would have liked to have been delivered in a different manner.

Now, I’m pretty relaxed on worldbuilding in fantasy books. I’m equally happy with the five-minute crafts Abercrombie “the northern country is called the North and they speak Northern” approach as I am with the more elaborate Sanderson “here are fifty pages of characters musing on Alethi gender roles” style (actually I kid; please do not make me read fifty pages on made-up gender roles). So, imagine my absolute surprise when my favourite thing in this trilogy ended up being the world Wexler built. Four hundred years before the start of the story, a war between two factions called the Chosen and the Ghouls broke out. The Chosen wielded genetically disposed divine magic, and the Ghouls everyman biomagic. The sides wiped each other out, leaving behind a plague-ridden, gross-biomagic fallout post-apocalyptic fantasy world. But before the Chosen died out, they entrusted a group of humans capable of wielding divine magic to shepherd humankind as they did before; this group then became a Jedi-like order called the Twilight Order. What a playground to delve into! I loved the way the post-war politics shaped this story in the form of the Twilight Order, the government, and the rogue, fiercely independent Splinter Kingdoms. It was an amazing, interesting setup that other fantasy books only wished they could have the depths of, and I will be eagerly looking for more books with this much world potential in the future.

Overall, I enjoyed my time with these books and am glad I read them. I don’t think I’ll be rereading these any time in the future, but I will carry fond memories of the worldbuilding in particular.