The synopsis made it sound good and made it compelling for me to finish. It sounded like a hunger games rip off but much more than that

I did not enjoy this book. It was too violent for my taste and the writing and plot left much to be desired. I think that someone might like this book. But I was not one of them.

Oof, I'm sorry but this was kind of a mess. I think the writing is decent for a debut novel, but the structure and plotting of this book didn't work for me at all.

This story follows two POVs (written in 1st-person): Coa and Ife. Other than a few stylistic choices, there wasn't much to differentiate their POVs in terms of narrative voice. Then, there's the fact that I honestly don't think this book should have been split-POV. If anything, I think this book should've focused on Coa and then a second book focused on Ife. It's possible that it could have worked if the author had structured things a bit differently, but the way it is in the ARC felt very... disjointed. Mostly due to the fact that the POVs switch every few chapters rather than every other chapter. This has the unfortunate side effect of cutting through any tension or build-up of action (usually occurring in Coa's POV) before jumping to Ife's which was often more politically driven or, honestly, heavy world-building.

While I applaud the author for going so deep into the world-building, I do question whether it was entirely necessary in this book. It felt like an overburdening of information. Especially because there were bits of world-building that were dropped in Ife's chapters that were then later dropped in Coa's POV. It just felt like too much and, again, really cut into the action.

Overall, this just wasn't for me. Even as an arc, I think this book needs a lot more work really tightening up the story and the pacing.

Thank you to Netgalley and Blackstone Publishing for providing me with an e-arc in exchange for an honest review!

DNF at 30%

This book definitely wasn’t bad and I’m sure many will enjoy it, but the story wasn’t as up my alley as the premise made me think it would be. I kept going until 30% but I got this far in and still don’t feel connected to the characters or invested in the plot despite its fast pacing, so I will be dnfing for now. I may go back and visit this again in the future to give it another try.

thanks to blackstone and netgalley.

i guess i have to say this at the top that i am against genocide, fascism, and systematic persecutory murder of any group of people. this novel deals very openly with these topics, and i do not want my low opinion of the book itself to be conflated with an endorsement of state sanctioned violence against the masses. i know this basically goes without saying, but i feel the need to cover my bases here, for reasons uhhhh i might get into. genocide is bad, i condemn all of those who perpetrate it.

we square? alright. strap in.

the empire wars is a lost cause. in my opinion it’s an utter marvel (derogatory) that it’s even being released. so complete are its failings, so baffling its choices, that i almost do not know where to begin. but alas we must start somewhere. much groundwork to be laid.

coa wildflower rangecroft has been drafted into a spectacle killing called the great hunt (welcome back robert jordan). she and her siblings were captured from hallowell (no longer part of the usa but think the marshland states of north america, louisiana, mississippi etc) (excluding florida, florida is still its own recognized place, don’t worry about it) and are subsequently enslaved as laborers by the allied force of the arctic empire. they live in concentration camps (term used by the book) and are effectively livestock. if coa is one of the 74 losers of the great hunt, her siblings will all be murdered. if she wins, they will be safe until the next hunt. (when is the hunt? i don’t know!).

chief princess ife of the makari-african empire is 16 pretending to be 18. when she was 13 she ran away from home, determined to infiltrate the arctic empire. and boy has she! her husband is maximus størmbane (diacritic through the o required), the son of the head general ruler of the allied force military. she plays the ditzy, stupid and frivolous exotic wife around him (and all people of the arctic empire) so she’s underestimated. ife spends the book trying to gather information about the allied force so she can do something with it. she also plans to use her proximity to the head general, maximus etc to kill them someday. not today tho.

the other primary male character is hazen creed (ex-military), a fellow participator in the great hunt who decides to team up with coa. why would he choose to help some small random feral girl? won’t they have to kill each other eventually? shouldn’t she be wary of this guy with an elite soldier’s training eventually betraying her? will a tense attraction develop between them? don’t worry about it!

the two of them also pick up a stray allied force blue blood richkid named bray who exists to be sympathetic, develop class consciousness, and reawaken tendrils of humanity in coa and hazen. initially, he believes that the whole process of the great hunt is just a really involved film set. also he has an underdeveloped parasocial crush on ife. bray is allowed to be on the island where the allied force snipers are hunting and trapping the participants. why does the arctic empire allow random civilians to basically participate in the hunt as long as they have enough money? isn’t there a risk some powerful wealthy citizen will be killed as collateral and cause a lot of problems for the government? do the survivors still think it’s all fake? i don’t know. don’t worry about it!!

i don’t want this to be a negative review where i lay out the plot for everyone to gawk at (though be assured, there’s so much to gawk at) so i’ll try to keep the rest of my summarizing and blow by blow recap to a minimum. no promises though.

it is unconventional for a book to marry fantasy and dystopic sci-fi elements, but alas the empire wars does. the arctic empire has insanely advanced technology (turning nuclear warheads into oxygen, invisible impenetrable body armor, mind consciousness experiments etc). HOWEVER! there are five types of elemental-ish magic users: rainborn, fireborn, huntborn, darkborn, sunborn. only one in 800 million people born outside of a single family from a specific village in makari-africa has magical powers. coa has fireborn lightning powers. coa is white. these are three seemingly incompatible statements that nonetheless are all true. don’t worry about it!

i bring this up because both of these genres tend to have different mechanics in terms of their respective utility regarding social commentary. generally speaking, sci-fi is forward looking (where we place our fears of the future), fantasy is backward looking (where we place our shames of the past); the creep of technology supplanting our sense of humanity and self vs the consequences of the inequities in old hierarchical structures of power (i am speaking Very Broadly, do not assassinate me). so when they’re combined this haphazardly, everything is rendered basically meaningless. magic is effectively neutered throughout the world, it has imposed limitations on users that never factor into the story, it does not interact with technology in any way, the spirituality often associated with magic is never explored. it doesn’t gel.

there’s no enforced sense of time to orient the reader in this dystopian landscape. a century of asteroid impacts decimated the human population, the arctic people nearly went extinct. BUT to my understanding, 33 years ago, the largest asteroid event happened which enabled the arctic empire to consolidate their power and fully dominate the rest of the world. below is the quote from the book. i will refrain as much as i can from quoting the book as i know it has yet to be published, but sometimes you just have to read it to believe it. this is (to my memory) the only time in the book these redefining global events are detailed.

"Throughout the past century, a series of impact events called the Antøx Asteroids have set the world on fire, upsetting the tides, triggering devastating natural disasters, destroying the world’s economies and livelihoods. However, none of them were as bad as the largest, which hit thirty-three years ago.

The mass extinction that followed it was almost as devastating as that caused by the six-mile-wide asteroid that once eliminated three-quarters of the vegetation and animal life on earth, including the dinosaurs. Every country was left vulnerable. Except one."

ok. i want to quibble with that last passage. invoking the cretaceous-paleogene extinction event without properly describing what you’re actually referencing leaves the reader with the wrong details. we don’t know anything definitive about the world you’re trying to build and now we’re thinking about dinosaurs. this is a new rule. my don’t-invoke-the-dinosaurs rule.

back on track.

the nebulous time placement isn’t a huge problem when known geographic terms are changed (no present day countries or regions are named in the hunger games). it implies a far future time, the unfamiliar accentuating how much the world has changed. but when places like britain and florida are referenced as still existing, when countries and their respective nationalities like germany, switzerland, norway et al are named in exposition dumps by a lead character it raises so many questions. it takes you out of the story. it’s disorienting. it’s kind of bad worldbuilding. wdym nukes can be turned into oxygen but britain still exists!!! will we never be free of them!!!!

another digression. not to belabor the physics defying anti-nuclear to oxygen technology, but that rest of the world’s technology (the transatlantic empire of america and britain specifically) is a hundred years behind the allied force’s is absolutely insane. america invented the arms race. nobody on earth spends more on military technology than the united states of america. how???? don’t worry about it.

god let’s get to germany, switzerland and norway. the allied force believes in arctic genetic supremacy, considering all people who don’t have 100% pure arctic blood to be “foreign” and therefore inferior, enslaveable, disposable. this includes those from germany, switzerland, norway, wider scandinavia and britain of course. all those from the makari-african empire are foreign, from america and hallowell, the russo-inspired vraničar empire, those from what used to be asia. foreign.

so that begs the question, what does it mean (in terms that we the readers can understand) to be purely arctic? perhaps it means indigenous sámi? specific slavic ethnic groups? maybe romani for some reason? no! in fact all three of these groups are specifically genocided by the allied force. i do not know what it means to be genetically arctic, and it seems that most people who still exist are not genetically arctic.

we must now return to seemingly incompatible truths that exist within this book. another quote. whoopee, numbers!

"'Only half the country is affiliated with the military [...] you need to be chosen. You think the greatest military on earth accepts every single man who enlists? Only the finest are inducted.’

During the mandatory propaganda tapes [...] the Allied Force glorifies [...] that their military contains 350 million soldiers. This boy said affiliated with the military. So that’s not even exclusively soldiers. That means associates [et. al] could be more than 350 million—if each of the soldiers has at least one affiliation. That means 700 million people could be half of their population. [...] their complete population might be over one billion."

does that math make sense? don’t worry about it. a vast percentage of the human population was killed by a century of asteroid strikes. most of the surviving people are considered non-arctic. the arctic empire has upward of 350 million people. the allied force still has not completed their quest of total world domination and eradication of every “foreigner”. how. if so many people are in the out-group, if populations have been so drastically changed, how is it logistically possible for a nation presumably around the arctic  circle to have so thoroughly subjugated the rest of the world.

nazi ideology and fascism never... got that far. and i refer to the nazis because of the obvious aesthetic and ideological similarities they share with the allied force (oh we will go further into this). but like. hitler never conquered europe. and maybe i’m just saying things, but i don’t think it would have been sustainable even if he did, especially with the narrow parameters of who is considered “aryan”.

to survive abolition, industrialization, and immigration, white supremacy in the united states had to evolve to absorb nationalities and ethnicities beyond the anglo-saxon, germanic, protestant christian elites. long on my to-read shelf has been how the irish became white by noel ignatiev, mainly because of my ponderance of the very question posed by the title. in so many modern discussions of race in america, bad faith actors often invoke the discrimination experienced by the irish, italian, eastern european jewish, etc to minimize the systemic oppression of people of color.

but functionally, these different ethnic groups were always white, in the sense that they would attend whites-only schools in the south, could join segregated labor unions, could legally marry an anglo-saxon or germanic person in most states (perhaps all). white supremacist ideology cannot exist without destroying the solidarity of various diverse racial and ethnic underclasses through the assimilation of some and bestowment of socioeconomic rewards upon them.

we all know that race and whiteness are social constructs. we know that race, ethnicity and nationality are different things. we all know the insidiousness of colorism amongst all communities, predominantly white or otherwise. but for this book, which is about genocide predicated on nationality and genetics, to never engage with the society and its citizens is intensely frustrating. to never define in any meaningful way what it means to be “arctic”, the implicit sociological and anthropological understandings that are relevant to international and interpersonal relations? why. what is the reason.

god forgive me i’m going to quote urr-fascism by umberto ecco.

"The followers [of fascism] must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. [...] However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy."

in some ways, the allied force does become a fascist stereotype. its leaders have committed more genocide than any other people in human history (this paraphrased directly from the book). it has an army of 350 million people. yet they do not covet the magic of the makari-africans, they simply kill them indiscriminately. its methods cannot be detailed because doing so would expose inconstancies in the very ideological foundation of the narrative.

totalitarianism is antithetical to what i believe is the human spirit. duh. whatever. it has been attempted in life and will be depicted in fiction. but why write it so incoherently. curiously enough the book never uses the terms fascism or fascist. chew on that!

the tone and voice of the text places weird reverence on very traditional, rugged, stoic, masculinity. hazen creed (ex-military) and maximus størmbane, prince of genocide are both blond, six-foot-something, gigachad warrior men. this attempts to be commentary. some might know of the alt-right, neo-nazi, western culture warriors’ common invocation of and fixation on norse and nordic aesthetics.

but i cannot emphasize enough how white-centered the narration of this book is. coa is blonde, she and hazen creed (ex-military) are both green eyed. maximus, prince of genocide is blue eyed. ife has green eyes and pink hair. maybe i should have lead with that detail. this book is 440 pages long. the words eye, eyes, eyebrow, eyelash and eyelid appear 421 times total. ife’s brother zaire’s eyes are green. bray’s eyes are a light whiskey brown. so are the eyes of an allied force sergeant. ife’s east asian hairstylist kateri’s eyes are mud brown. and im not even joking.

maximus, prince genocide is described as accommodating, attentive, attractive. ife thinks he killed her beloved grandfather as he was begging for mercy. he does not eat meat around ife because she’s a vegetarian. he has killed untold numbers of people. he has been raising his youngest brother outside of their culture’s hyper-militaristic standards of masculinity. as much as ife says maximus only loves the idea of her, she recognizes that his expressions of love are genuine. there is no nonwhite male character who is afforded this amount of interiority.

if a white author wrote all of this, they could be called racist, and for good reason! why did she call the only nonwhite character’s brown eyes mud colored i’m simply stuck on that.

perhaps this book wasn’t meant to be thought of in such depth. akana phenix could certainly claim that. but when you’re dealing with such topics as genocide, ethnic cleansing, the ritual murder and extinction of people, it begs introspection and a close read. especially when the book randomly name drops different historical atrocities in only the most superficial of ways.

frequently the novel starts naming and describing aspects historical genocides, mass killings, and war crimes. the criminal medical experiments of japan’s unit 731, holodomor, the millions killed in the congo free state, and most personally egregious to me, the interrogation and execution center of tuol sleng (known during the dictatorship of pol pot as security prison 21, SP-21).

i know many MANY people whose families fled cambodia during the terror inflicted by the khmer rouge. i learned about it in middle school, reading memoirs of local community members in social studies. they are my neighbors, their children are my childhood classmates. this is recent. the first star wars film was in movie theaters while people were being purged in tuol sleng.

that akana phenix, who obviously cares about the injustice and horrors of genocide, invokes such history in so casual a way is infuriating and irreconcilable to me. the book has so little to say about the important topics it depicts. there is no insight. there is no thought.

this halting of the story happens again in a scene attempting character work, when coa is reflecting upon her own upbringing. this scene with hazen creed (ex-military).

she and her five siblings were taken in by a man named whitelaw (chris pine middle name tea). he turned the children into a traveling sideshow attraction, letting suburbia gawk at how wild and feral they are, having coa show off some of her lightning magic. he taught them to read, cared for them when they were sick, never physically abused them. contrasted with their next guardian caner (who coa thinks murdered whitelaw, don’t worry about it) who beats these children regularly. he acclimates them into structured society at the threat of horrible violence.

hazen creed (ex military) then starts reciting from webmd or the dsm5 about exploitation in relationships. she resists, then chapters later, thanks to the magic of the hunting island (don’t worry about it) and hazen’s memories of love from his own mother, she accepts his explanation of her own life.

phenix writes this change in coa’s thinking into four paragraphs. there is no further exploration of her feelings, no actual on page description of how these magic mind sharing memories makes her feel, a switch simply flips. she should have killed whitelaw! moving on! baffling writing choice.

i was going to detail my granular problems with a bad habit in phenix’s prose but god this is so long. i could talk about the uneven pacing (though the tension does escalate as the book goes on. more than can be said about others), the utter lack of commercial viability i see here but i’ve got to end somewhere.

why even write this book. what does this novel say that hasn’t been said before, or better, or more concisely. i truly don’t understand how this is the best version of this book; it is a poor reflection on all in editorial who worked on it. i cannot recommend it in any way. god bless.

also. using the terms Vikąrian and Vraničar in the same book? referring to different entities? why the fuck would you do that!

Dnf, I couldn't get passed some of the violence in this book. It was not for me. I was excited to read this book based in the synopsis and book cover ..