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Book: “The Phoenix King” by Aparna Verma
Publishing Info: Orbit, August 2023
Where Did I Get this Book: ARC from the publisher!
Where Can You Get this Book: WorldCat.org | Amazon | IndieBound
Book Description: The Ravani kingdom was born of a prophecy, carved from unforgiving desert sands and ruled by the Ravence bloodline: those with the power to command the Eternal Fire.
Elena Aadya is the heir to the throne—and the only Ravence who cannot wield her family’s legendary magic. As her coronation approaches, she will do whatever it takes to prove herself a worthy successor to her revered father. But she doesn’t anticipate the arrival of Yassen Knight, the notorious assassin who now claims fealty to the throne. Elena’s father might trust Yassen to be a member of her royal guard, but she is certain he is hiding something.
As the threat of war looms like a storm on the horizon, the two begin a dangerous dance of intrigue and betrayal. And the choices they make could burn down the world.
Review: This book was originally self-published as “The Boy With Fire” before it was picked up by Orbit to be traditionally published under this new title. As such, it already has a fairly devoted fan base who really loved it and, I’m sure, were very excited to get this new version of the book. For me, I hadn’t heard of the book originally, but was excited to check it out, not only due to the hype of previous fans, but because the synopsis sounds right up my alley. I obviously really loved “The Poppy Wars,” so any comparison there is a good sign. And then I was also intrigued by its connections to Hinduism and Indian mythology.
But, while the book overall did have positives, I found myself struggling to read it. Before I get into any of the negatives, I do want to talk about the aspects of the book that I appreciated. For one thing, the writing was very evocative and strong. This very much read as an author who has a firm grip on their own voice and style. The plot moves smoothly (if slowly) and the characterization is fairly solid. I also really liked the book’s depiction of religion and how it is explored throughout the story. While I don’t have a strong knowledge of Hinduism, I liked what we saw here with how it was applied to this fantasy world. As far as world-building goes, I also liked the general idea of mixing fantasy and sci-fi elements into one story.
However, while these all were strengths of the story, my actual experience of reading the book felt like a slog. I think a lot of this has to do with pacing. This book is not short and it takes a long time for any real action to begin. However, at the same time, some of the information is presented in a way that feels rushed or under-explained. The pacing wasn’t helped by the multiple POVs that make up the story. There are many challenges of writing a successful multi-POV novel. The one I’ve most often talked about is the difficulty of writing voices and characters that feel distinct from one another and who have enough of an arch to justify their own page time. But another challenge is the fact that switches in POV can disrupt the pace, and I think that was one of my struggles here.
My second real sticking point was with the characters. I feel like I’ve been running into this problem a lot with some of the recent adult fantasy novels I’ve read lately, but, again, the female POV character, Elena, read much closer to a YA heroine than an adult. Again, no shade on YA heroines, but if a book is billed as an adult fantasy, I expect the adult characters to be going through arcs and challenges that would be typical of that age group. Instead, we see a lot of naivety and a coming-of-age story from Elena, themes which are much more in line with a YA storyline.
For his part, Yassan was more interesting to me, but I did end up becoming quite frustrated with a reveal we get towards the end of the book. I won’t spoil what it was, but it was the kind of reveal that made the fact that we had been in Yassan’s head for large chunks of this book suddenly feel disingenuous. Yassan is not aware that he’s a character in a book and needs to hold back certain information for climatic purposes later in the story. It makes zero sense that he wouldn’t refer to these things in his own inner thoughts, so when it’s later revealed, it’s like a dash of cold water to the reader’s face, casting you out of the reading experience.
Similarly, I didn’t really buy the love story between these two. It wasn’t objectively bad, but I didn’t feel any chemistry between then, and was generally not very invested in their romance. Overall, this was a disappointing read. It definitely has strengths, and I’m sure it will resonate with some readers. Unfortunately, it just didn’t hit right for me.
Rating 7: While the writing is solid and I enjoyed the themes around religion, I struggled to connect with the characters in this one.
Reader’s Advisory:
“The Phoenix King” can be found on these Goodreads lists: Indian Inspired Fantasy Books and South Asian Fantasy
The Library Ladies 