There are a lot of characters here and the author likes to showcase that there are no really "good" or "bad" ones, no main protagonist or antagonist, everyone is a little bit of both. Obsidian: Awakening had been on my TBR for some time so I jumped at the opportunity to take part in a buddy read on Dom’s Book Club Discord channel. It imbues every aspect of the book and provides a living, breathing foundation to everything which happens. The tension, both on a grand political scale and on an intimate personal scale, is simply sharper than a knife and left me completely breathless at times, which made this an exhausting reading experience in the best way possible. The only reason I didn’t read the entire book sooner (I finished yesterday) was because I follow Sienna on X and she keeps implying she puts her characters through hell with a purpose.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. That’s because everything about this magnificent book makes it a fertile oasis for waxing lyrical about it. She had, after all, thrown in some difficult words on purpose for a chance to see that arrogance being subdued a little.Despite the white and black of its deserts setting, it is all about shades of grey and the perspectives of different cultures. He tells his men they won’t keep him from the streets, from trying to rescue his wife, and if they wish to, he’ll kill them.

Forced to flee into the most hostile territory belonging to deadly desert warriors, he is captured by Djari, the dutiful daughter of a tribe leader who offers him a choice between death and a lifetime of servitude. I really liked how most of these characters are either directly related or know of each other, which made it super interesting to explore and compare how they view and present themselves versus how they are perceived by the other characters.Despite being together for almost twenty years, with a son between them, Muradi and Zahara didn’t seem to have moved on from her performatively hating him during sex and passionately wanting him dead. One highlight is a randomly deadly hunting scene where horse archers gallop, shooting arrows, into a stampede of gazelles - the trick being not to shoot each other for fear of an insult to honour.

At first you might feel a bit overwhelmed by the unfamiliar terms and names, but I personally really liked the ‘no hand holding’ approach here. In many ways, his monstrosities are the ways he survived and copes with the horrors he was made to endure. The plot is largely political as Djari and Lasura, in particular, are brought together by destiny/prophecy to stop the war.From a distance, the Salar of Rasharwi is nothing more than a monster, a tyrant who slaughters and who uses every available weapon of manipulation and torment to get what he wants. I was simultaneously rushing through it out of pure addiction, and also trying to delay the inevitable ending. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. It’s very character-driven, by an author who refuses to tone anything down or to follow any patterns or plot devices or advice that does not fit her story (after all, life does not fit into a preconceived format like some novels are written to).

They’re all so broken and twisted and messed up in so many ways, and all of them are just aching to be loved and accepted and known in a way they’ve never been able to experience, even if they don’t know it. It’s not something seen often in fantasy, and I enjoy when authors deviate from the usual/predictable path. Inspired by, rather than based on, Arabic and Mongolian cultures, the peninsula setting of the Black and White Deserts is so rich and in-depth, and the worldbuilding is weaved masterfully through the narrative. My husband, as my alpha reader, is always hitting me over the head about not cramming every novel in my head into a single book. They are tools, pieces on a peninsula-sized chess board, to be used as weapons by whoever proves the most cunning players of the long-game.She also remembered how Muradi had stood in the middle of the rubble, in a field burnt to ashes littered with corpses you could no longer recognize, staring down at a charred figure of a mother holding her child as though it had been someone he knew, and had seemed to forget she was there entirely. The prince is impressed by the woman’s bravery and intellect, and decides to make her one of his wives, against the woman’s will.