So long as you fight the darkness, you stand in the light
I enjoyed reading more in the world of the Masks and Blood Shrike. A Torch Against the Light starts where An Ember in the Ashes leaves off.
Book Review: A Torch Against the Night by Sabaa Tahir
Rating:
Title & Author: A Torch Against the Night by Sabaa Tahir
Genre: Fantasy, Romance
Release Date: August 30 2016
Series: An Ember in the Ashes
Publisher: Razorbill
Synopsis
Elias and Laia are running for their lives. After the events of the Fourth Trial, Martial soldiers hunt the two fugitives as they flee the city of Serra and undertake a perilous journey through the heart of the Empire.
Laia is determined to break into Kauf—the Empire’s most secure and dangerous prison—to save her brother, who is the key to the Scholars’ survival. And Elias is determined to help Laia succeed, even if it means giving up his last chance at freedom.
But dark forces, human and otherworldly, work against Laia and Elias. The pair must fight every step of the way to outsmart their enemies: the bloodthirsty Emperor Marcus, the merciless Commandant, the sadistic Warden of Kauf, and, most heartbreaking of all, Helene—Elias’s former friend and the Empire’s newest Blood Shrike.
Bound to Marcus’s will, Helene faces a torturous mission of her own—one that might destroy her: find the traitor Elias Veturius and the Scholar slave who helped him escape…and kill them both.
I give A Torch Against the Night by Sabaa Tahir four out of five stars because I do not like where Elias ends up in the end of the novel. But overall it is a very good book.
The novel starts off with Elias and Laia in the tunnels under the city where we left them at the end of An Ember in the Ashes and from that moment on it is one big rollercoaster. In which the stops are moments where Elias is in the Inbetweenland. These are a bit more calm, but more difficult to estimate where Sabaa wants to take it. This is also where my annoyance for this book comes from. It gives Elias an easy way out of death. Which I thought was such an important thing for the book to have happen.
Elias and Laia have death breathing down their neck and this keeps you on the edge of your seat while. I enjoyed that a lot. Laia and group are trying to get to Kauf, while Elias gets there earlier and helped with the situation there. I thought this gave the novel an interesting point. Because even though it does put Elias in this really dark spot, it gives you information that we would have otherwise not gotten.
I would have liked to see how Elias would be pulled back to the Inbetweenland. I think it would have at least felt more satisfying than what the end is now. But I do not think it makes it a bad book or anything, it just lacks a bit.
Overall A Torch Against the Night is a good novel, I just thought it could have been better if things had been done differently or just left out. I do not think keeping us waiting for how Elias becomes the soulcatcher is the nicest thing to do. There might be a case of trying to milk the cow for what it is worth, but I hope it is not.
Let me know what you thought of this book!
If you have any requests for which book I should talk about next, please let me know in the comments down below.
For now, let books enrich your life!