Bookish Brews Snapshot
Cry, Voidbringer by Elaine Ho
After being kidnapped from her family and all that she’s ever known to fight in the endless wars for Ashvi, Hammer has turned into a jaded soldier who thinks only about herself. But when she accidentally saves Viridian, she starts to remember there’s more to this world than perpetual war.
🌱 Character Growth 💀 Dark Content 🌳 Found Family 🪖 Military
- Genre: Fantasy, Speculative Fiction
Book Review
What does it take to be free and what do we have to give up on the way? After being kidnapped from her family and all that she’s ever known to fight in the endless wars for Ashvi, Hammer has turned into a jaded soldier who thinks only about herself. But when she accidentally saves Viridian, she starts to remember there’s more to this world than perpetual war. When Viridian’s devastating godchild powers manifest, the queen of Ashvi sees her opportunity to get a leg up in the war and reclaim the land that Ashvi lost generations before.
Most of the main characters in the book are part of the “faceless,” which is a subclass of people within the Ashvi kingdom that were largely kidnapped from their families and forced to fight in the Ashvi wars. One thing that I really appreciated in this book is that each one of the characters were trying to escape their situations in different ways. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that people in a relatively privileged position are still harmed by the hierarchies that we place on each other, even though they do not receive the brunt of it. And that we’re required to give up so much of ourselves and who we are to reach that place of privilege.
This book gives us a reminder that creating different classes of people, determining people’s worth based on where they come from and who they are, will always be antithetical to our liberation. And without abolishing these hierarchies altogether, we’re never going to be able to escape from them. No matter what pathway you take. And no matter how selfish or selfless you’re trying to be. There is no way to truly escape it without building something entirely new.
The thing that stood out to me the most from this story was how clear it was that normal people are always put in harms way from war and they also get absolutely zero benefit from it. The wars over territory for the greed and whims of kings and queens are pointless and just lead to a world where people like you and me have to be caught up in someone else’s pointless perpetual war. I love a story that is very clearly anti-war, which is not as common in epic fantasy as it should be.
Reading this in the shadow of the United States illegally bombing and kidnapping the president of Venezuela in the dead of night really made the character’s comments about the endless wars pop out from the page and reach an evergreen truth. War benefits no one except for the rich and powerful. It is pointless and it is childish. It is always in service of the greed of the rich and powerful, whether it be seizing lands that have not belonged to you for hundreds of years, or violating international law to steal oil and make your fellow billionaires even wealthier.
