Devastating, visionary, and fiercely human, Cry, Voidbringer delivers the kind of speculative fiction that doesn’t just rip open the world—it guts you emotionally while doing it.

Through the eyes of Hammer—a conscripted soldier forged by war and disillusionment—we’re dropped into a brutal empire where magic has withered and power is now wielded through colonization, manipulation, and generational trauma. Hammer is a hardened survivor, but the quiet, dangerous arrival of Viridian cracks something open in her: duty colliding with conscience, survival twisted up with love.

This book feels like it was created by an artist in every sense. The prose is sharp and muscular but rich with visual detail—like battlefields painted in ash and fire, or cities trembling under the weight of history. The story doesn’t shy away from moral ambiguity, and it refuses to let you look away from the consequences of power—how it’s hoarded, stolen, misused, and mythologized.

Viridian herself is a revelation: a child born into a system that only wants to weaponize her, but whose presence forces everyone around her to confront what they’ve accepted as “necessary.” And as the war machine lurches on, Hammer is left questioning whether liberation is truly possible—or just another face of conquest.

If you loved The Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin or The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang, this belongs on your shelf yesterday. Cry, Voidbringer is not just about fighting back—it’s about who we become in the fight, and what we’re willing to lose to win.

One of the most interesting things about this book is the style and how perspective is portrayed. We step into the through the eyes of Hammer, Naias and Vidi. The perspective of the former two is through third-person narration, making the reader step back and see the world holistically. It’s also a great way to offer exposition without it feeling too forced. Vidi’s perspective is told through first person narration at first - drawing in the reader and offering more emotion and introspection - before switching to third (and later, second) person half way through, revealing an almost dissociative trance. Each perspective is unique, making it easy for the reader to remember who’s narrating at any given time.

The author also uses poetic technique such as repetition, using lowercase even for proper nouns, and removing punctuation to place the reader in the same stream-of-consciousness as the narrator. This is usually used when memories or flashbacks are presented. The character focused narrative means the plot is quite slow. However, it does quicken during action scenes and with the use of shorter chapters. That said, there lulled moments - with some feeling intentional and beautiful with the use of poetic technique, while others drag on. This is because it felt like the book was trying to say too much and go in too many different directions, rather than focus on one central thesis.

Even though this novel is character-driven, some of the relationships feel underdeveloped. Vidi and Rafaeis’ connection is beautiful and tender from the start, but Hammer starts off loathing Vidi and having to take care of her then sudden cares for her intensely. The tension between Hammer and Naias was delicious, you could feel their history stitched into every interaction, but Hammer and Rafaeis went from “there is something brewing here” to co-parents who love and trust one another implicitly in what felt like a small amount of time. This would be fine in plot-driven novels, so readers who prefer stories driven by plot may not find issue with this at all. However, as a person who loves character-driven story, it felt like the characterisation that had been established was often neglected when it cane to forwarding certain plot points.

All that said, I did enjoy the plot. The world-building felt tangible and the godchild aspect was an intriguing way to have characters hold godlike powers while also being deeply and humanly flawed. I liked the political nuances across the different kingdoms(?) and Khall felt like a political type one would see in our own world today: self-centred and unable to empathise with others outside her own class and ethnicity. The anti-colonialism messaging was strong - particularly around Naias’ storyline and her trying to win over her oppressors and fight ‘from the inside’ - and the theme of resistance - whether it was outright rebellion, malicious compliance, or playing the game to achieve results - was multifaceted and realistic. That said, many of these plot points felt rushed, such as how quickly powers are manifested and understood; how easy recovery from intense wounds are (i.e., recovering from lashes super quickly); and how abruptly the battles and action scenes seem to end.

And yet, with all this, I’m keeping my rating high because, even with the issues I had, this book still felt fresh and exciting. As I mentioned earlier, I really enjoyed the use of poetic technique, and the strong narrative voice helped novel the story forward. I liked the fact that most (if not all?) the characters were queer and even when you despised them, their queerness was never related to their flaws; it was a natural and integrated part of characterisation and story. I also think this novel carries a helpful message of hope and shows the reader that, while one person can’t change the world, a collective might have a fighting chance. This is something that is really needed right now. That said, the ending does set the scene for a sequel and I’m not that invested in any continuation of this story if that were to happen.

I found this book to be an enjoyable read. The story kept me engaged from start to finish and had some moments that really stood out. Overall, it offered an entertaining reading experience.

What a book. I was floored from the first moment. Politically heavy fantasy isn't usually for me, but Ho reminds me of N.K. Jemisin--rich worldbuilding, characters whose evolving relationships will stick to your ribs forever, a huge universe hiding just beyond the pages. An unflinching examination of colonialism, racist power structures, and war--heartbreaking and real, real, real. But truly what makes this a five-star read for me is Viri's characterization--how her relationship with Hammer develops across the pages is so achingly real I know it will stay with me.
100000/5, read this book!

The opening scene of this book grabs you by the hair and drags you in, all your protests ignored. Hang on 'cause it will be a turmoilous ride!
The worldbuilding was nice, though not always easy to follow. Explanation earlier on of the religious system would have been great. It made the last 100 pages kind of heavy to read.
I could sympathise with most characters, with Rafaeis in the lead and Hammer the epitome of female rage. Viri is a cool character, but I couldn't get into her head as much: her voice didn't feel like one of a 12 year old to me. While reading, the POVs switch often and it gives you insight into the problems from different angles. But when characters and POVs start changing names and then a narrator (?) takes one as well... I felt a bit taken out of the flow.
If you love romance in your fantasy, then this book has -very lgbtqia+ proof by the way- two connected subplots. Without giving away too much: I sometimes felt you got too much of one and too little in the other subplot. The focus lies more on the psychological themes of loneliness and belonging reflected in the micro relations between characters as in the macro politics in the different realms.
The style of writing in this book isn't easy and that's great. Fantasy should have more challenging books linguistically.

All in all a good story with great elements. Would I recommend it? If you are up for a world full of warriors and gods, with a good amount psychologically damaged characters, I'd say go for it!

This book took a hammer to my heart, so many times I’m surprised I survived it. Suffice to say, it was a wonderful experience.
I found this intense, well written and I absolutely ate this up. I loved how well I knew the characters, how much I loved and hated them at the same time. That understanding of their decisions from their perspective but also the frustration with their decisions was perfectly evoked. The wording and the chapters felt economical in words and concepts, it didn’t feel inflated at all but concurrently held so much.
I loved the world-building and the Gods, I feel like it created something so big in a way that didn’t feel hefty. The people and cultures created were beautiful and the pieces on the board that were all constantly moving in their own directions outside of what we could see. But goodness it was intense. I wanted to rant at characters. I was gasping out loud. I had to put the book down a few times to fume.
This is going on my books with bisexual main characters list as well! I also clocked some light poly rep which I enjoyed. There are many queer relationships centre stage here, with three sapphic main characters and queer side characters, and also many people of colour.
Negatives: I think the only thing I didn’t enjoy was the ending. I feel like it should have ended a couple of chapters earlier to leave the reader with that conflicting feeling I mentioned earlier. The ending the author chose left me wondering why they chose to end it that way. I can’t say more as I want to avoid spoilers. However, the ending didn’t spoil the experience of the book for me - I felt like there was still payoff and the ending I wanted was there.
Are there notes? Yes. Is it still five stars? Also, yes.

Thank you Netgalley & Left Unread Books for the ARC.

A gorgeous and violent saga of fantasy and fighting!
I'm a huge fan of taking down the system (especially one as corrupt as the system from this world) and when done with beautiful writing like this, it all comes together.

My only issue was that there were some spots that were a little difficult to follow (from wording and pacing), but that wasn't too difficult to get past.

Overall a great read, that was gripping and very interesting!

I thought this was very good and I will have to add this to the shop shelves. Thank you for the chance for us to review.

3.5 or 3.75 rounded up!

The aspects of this book that I especially enjoyed are the characters, mythology, and plot. The characters are fully-formed--as individuals and in their relations to each other--and the found-family themes are some of the most compelling. I think my favorite part is the world that's created, of indentured soldiers and god-children. There's a ruthlessness in this book that I really enjoyed (as weird as that may sound)... when depicting such gruesome ideas, I think you need ruthlessness. The idea of a child having such a horrendous gift... this was especially intriguing.

I struggled with the pacing, world-building, and some of the writing. I was engaged all the way through but zoomed out, i really struggle with the novel's structure. We cover a over a year, but I found it hard to *feel* that; I didn't feel that all that much had happened. With the world-building, I must acknowledge that I'm not the best reader when it comes to political machinations. That being said, I did find the court intrigue to be a little confusing and uninteresting.

I'd definitely check out more from this author, and/or a sequel... i just wish there had been a little more editing.

I don’t even know how to put this book into words without setting my own heart on fire. Cry, Voidbringer is easily one of the most gut-wrenching, fantastical, and politically rich pieces of literature I’ve read in a LONG time. It’s for sure a dark fantasy. Bleak but beautiful, intimate but epic. The author doesn’t waste a single sentence.

The world-building? Immersive! We’re thrown into it & Ho trusts us to keep up! It reminded me so much of how N.K. Jemisin's layers of cultural commentary are always so woven/embedded into the story. It's just raw power, survival, colonization, and what happens when liberation gets weaponized. Hammer is the kind of character that makes you ache physically! She's tough as hell but cracked a little, you know? Viridian? Whew. Watching THAT relationship evolve damn near broke me. These aren’t your typical hero tropes, because they’re so EPIC-ALLY human. In the final third, I was clutching my Kindle like it was the last lifeline. I could not put down the absolute rage, the heartbreak, and the twists (that I didn't recognize as a thing coming up)? Pure gold!

This style needs a new genre: it's feminist, anti-colonial, and feral in the best way. More like this, please. Immediately! Elaine Ho, you deserve the flowers.

Cry, Voidbringer is a complex narrative about tyranny, complicity to violence, and xenophobic exploitation. The book focuses especially on the coping strategies one might use to survive such a dark world, and the consequences of these choices. The narrative spans a wide variety of characters: the manipulative consort of a struggling queen, a child who has the power to massacre her enemies, and a warrior stolen from her culture from a young age and made complicit in a tyrannical government. This book follows the consequences both of rising paranoia and escalating violence of a young queen who inherited her father’s rebelling kingdom. Amidst the bloodshed, a found family is formed for a brief moment in time: Viridian, a child stolen from her home for the supernatual power she might one day possess; Hammer, a dour and violent Faceless warrior assigned to look after her, and Crescent, a fellow Faceless who sees a hope in the world that Hammer does not. Much of the book centers on the consequences of this brief peace: what would you do to restore your family and its happiness? What actions are justifiable if your ultimate goal is peace for the people you once cared about? What happens in the ensuing violence irrevocably changes the people you once loved?

These questions are the greatest strength of this novel: I thought it did an amazing job setting up interesting and complex questions. The characters diverge greatly in how they respond to the conditions they find themselves in: do they hold on to hope or let it go? Do they seek ways to gain from the situation, or do they care more for the people around them? When do the relationships built in these conditions fracture? In terms of building a story that frames a weighty moral, I think this book is a great success.

However, I did struggle with the pacing of this book. It covers a lot of ground—both in the questions it raises and the sheer bulk of plot covered. Especially with how much time focal characters spend apart, there is just a lot of story in this book. By including so much, I felt that there were large pieces that lost their impact because there just wasn’t time. Especially Hammer and Crescent’s relationship, though I felt that Viridian’s relationships with both of them suffered as well. There overall pacing of the book exacerbated this: the first half of the book was so slow to build story and stakes I nearly put it down for lack of interest, and the last half of the book covered so much that I was often confused about the state of things. For context, in the first half of the book, I legitimately couldn’t figure out the scale of the kingdom because so few aspects of it were described, and in the second half I had the opposite problem—suddenly so much existed that I couldn’t keep track of the stakes of the world.

In the end, this was a 3.5 star book for me, rounded up. It has given me a lot to think about even if there were some technical aspects of the writing that I struggled with. I do think it is important context that this is written as though it is the first book in a duology or series. While I wouldn’t call the ending a cliffhanger, it’s clear that the story isn’t over; I wish that this had been made clear in the marketing of this book as it would have changed how I approached it.

The world building was immersive and an absolute joy to experience! I loved how there were such high stakes for the characters! The book also nailed using multiple POV. The pacing was good as well!

That is how epic fantasy should be ! i was very impressed for a debut it was amazing, the political side was complex and could mirror the real world perfectly to talk about the oppressor and oppressed dynamic where the inaction starts to help the oppression unfortunately and also the current atrocities. It was hard to see these character grow up and come to conflict and come to extreme conclusions when you know where they come from and understand their point of view. I adore Viri she was compelling and found myself attached and there was Naias that i am fascinated wit, the queen's confident and lover she tried and believed herself to have power because of it and didnt see how it turned Her into an oppressor, traitor of her land until it was too late and seeing her process was heartwrenching. I also loved the deities created they were super interesting and you could feel the respect for them through the book and its very hard to do so i respect that

in conclusion it was a violent read, i wont forget in a while because the message sent is strong as much as i loved to read about those characters

Thank you to NetGalley and publisher for the arc!

Life is too short to read books that bore me. Unfortunately, that was the case here. I saw so many glowing reviews that talk about this book like it’s the second coming of Christ, so I thought this books would make me feel anything other than apathy, but alas. The prose was bland, the characters weren’t engaging, and neither was any particular plot line. Also, who can move around with 100 lashes???

No matter how many times I’ve heard the phrase “don’t judge a book by its cover”, I can’t help but feel like that’s bad advice. I understand the wisdom that it’s trying to impart, but I feel that it omits the possibility of finding something wonderful based on nothing but an initial aesthetic infatuation. Case in point, while scrolling through NetGalley a couple of months ago, I was stopped in my tracks by the elegant simplicity of the cover art for Elaine Ho’s debut novel, Cry, Voidbringer. Fantasy novels often have what I would consider kind of garish and overstimulating book covers, going for a type of maximalism that I just can’t get behind. In contrast, Cry, Voidbringer’s minimalist art drew me in instantly, and I’m so glad it did because boy howdy, this thing’s a winner.

Cry, Voidbringer is a fantasy novel in that there are magical powers, kingdoms warring with each other, and a messianic figure of sorts that hangs in the balance between good and evil. Underneath those well-tread tropes of the genre lies something much stickier and more substantive. This story manages to exist as both fantasy entertainment and a parable for real world atrocities, near flawlessly. No one likes a book that feels like a lecture, and that is not the case here.

Cry, Voidbringer on its face is about a kingdom called Ashvi that is actively falling apart after the death of its king, near constant war with neighboring kingdoms, and the hasty appointment of the king’s daughter to the throne. The military strength of Ashvi comes from generations of “faceless” soldiers; children violently conscripted into the queen’s service, branded with tattoos on their foreheads as a symbol of their subjugation. One of these faceless soldiers is our main POV character, Hammer, a jaded nihilist who has known almost nothing but cruelty and betrayal in her life as a mercenary. However, a sense of empathy and compassion begins to grow in Hammer as she is charged with protecting Viri, a young girl stolen from her homeland. Viri is far from ordinary, as she may have powers that could all but ensure Ashvi’s ascension as a colonial power.

The book rotates POV chapters between Hammer, Viri, and Naias, the queen’s lead advisor and part-time lover. As much as I appreciated all three points of view, I found the Naias chapters especially compelling. Naias, while being the queen’s closest confidant, is perpetually at arm’s length from real power because of her ancestry. As is the case with colonial powers in the real world, Ashvi’s strength as a kingdom comes from the exploitation and destruction of other cultures and the people around it. Naias, having come from one of these subjugated cultures, finds herself in no man’s land; a traitor to her people while never being accepted as one of their own by the ruling class. This dynamic makes her emblematic of so much of what Cry, Voidbringer tries to impart on its readers. What happens when the oppressed become the oppressor? How can someone be chewed up and spit out by such a monstrous force decide to become another tooth in the maw of their own abuser?

I cannot claim to be an expert on any of what Cry, Voidbringer brings to the table. However, it doesn’t take a genius to be able to draw parallels between what goes on in this beautifully constructed novel and what’s happening in front of our noses in the very real world around us. Cry, Voidbringer for my money is a masterpiece that manages to paint a crushing, poignant picture of the horrors of colonialism while giving some of the best character work of any fantasy novel I’ve ever read.

Alongside the brutality and violence that persists throughout the book, these is also a sense of aching spirituality that really sold the book for me. The animating forces of the world are represented by three gods that the various cultures represented in Cry, Voidbringer revere, fear and interpret to their own ends based on their distinct cultural practices and histories. Without giving too much away, the last thrust of this book as it careens towards the end delves heavily into the spiritual aspects of this world, elevating this story from something good to something transcendent. For what it’s worth, it took me about four weeks to read the first 60% of the book and about 24 hours to read the rest. I was absolutely gob smacked by the last half of this book.

Cry, Voidbringer is a brutal read, but one that I won’t forget for a long, long time. Congratulations to Elaine Ho for creating what I hope to be a lasting work of art as a first-time author. I am along for the ride for whatever she decides to write next, and I hope that this book gets all the attention it deserves. 5/5.

Thank you to Bindery Books for the ARC of this book.

It took me a bit to get going with this book—in part due to formatting issues with the e-ARC—but once I did, it completely sucked me in.

Hammer and Viridian's found family is the emotional driving force of this story. They provide 2 of the 3 perspectives in the book, and my investment in these characters was what kept me reading during some lulls in the pacing.

The third perspective follows Naias, a former "faceless" soldier, who has climbed her way into the role of the Queen's advisor and lover. I struggled with this perspective for the first third or so of the book because Queen Khall was so insufferably whiny and incompetent. I never came to sympathize with Khall, but she did thankfully evolve enough that I was able to appreciate Naias's perspective. Naias provides a really interesting example of what it means it try to compromise with power and institute changes from within, and the way it can change you. It feels particularly relevant to explore the ways one becomes complicit in and a perpetrator of state violence, how easy it is to feel powerless—and thus not responsible—from a position of relative power.

This was a compelling and heartbreaking exploration of colonial violence and the ways that violence cascades—how the colonized become colonizers, how a subjugated country will further subjugate its own people, and how victims of colonial violence also become its perpetrators. The book is unique both in its structure and the way it plays with perspective and in its thematic explorations, and I can't wait to read more.

Elaine Ho does a fantastic job in writing this book, it had that element that I was wanting from the description and how it was told in this storyline. The characters had that element that I was looking for and enjoyed the overall concept of them in this storyline. The overall package worked well and am excited for more from Elaine Ho.

The storyline of this book is genuinely refreshing. However, I think I personally would've enjoyed the story more if every chapter had been written from a first-person point of view.

Since I've joined this site, my sleep schedule has been effed up because I am already way too addicted to it.

I HAD to stay up late to finish this book. It was a ferocious need. I couldn't put it down in spite of my eyes demanding I closed them for the day. It was too good and it required I knee how it ended.

I simply adored it.

This book's perspective was so unique, and I felt that contributed to how heart wrenching and emotional this was. You get to see characters manipulated into horrible things and you understand where nearly everyone is coming from so when characters come into conflict you really feel it. The anti colonial messaging of the book is strong and it's themes of revenge, loss, and fear are deeply explored. The magic and world building were so interesting, too!