Book Review: Along the Razor's Edge, by Rob J. Hayes
An angsty teen protagonist in a self-published fantasy novel that actually works.
self-published, 2020, 380 pages
An empire in flames. A prisoner of war. An unbreakable will to escape.
At just 15, Eskara Helsene fought in the greatest war mankind has ever known - and lost. There is only one place her enemies would send a Sourcerer as powerful as her: the Pit, a prison sunk so deep into the earth the sun is a distant memory. Now, she finds herself stripped of her magic; a young girl surrounded by thieves, murderers, and worse. In order to survive she will need to make new allies, play the inmates against each other, and find a way out.
Her enemies will soon find out that Eskara is not so easily broken.
I first heard of this book on some YouTube reviewer's channel who was promoting underrated fantasy novels he thought deserved more attention. I didn't even realize when I picked it up that it was self-published. My experience with self-published books has been hit or miss, but mostly miss. Self-publishing does not have the stigma it once did and more and more authors are actually making a living at it, but still, there are a thousand failures for every author who catches an audience, and even highly popular series like Cradle and Worm have fallen flat for me, reading like fan-fiction that became popular because it was full of nerdgasmic geek-stroking.
I wasn't expecting much, is what I'm saying. And on the surface, Along the Razor's Edge appeared to be a grimdark fantasy tropapalooza: teenage girl who used to be a powerful sorcerer but gets thrown into a fantasy prison and has to fight her way out, swearing vengeance bwahahaha.
Holy fuck, I loved this book. I loved this book so much I might just jump the next book ahead of the queue on my TBR list.
The premise is not highly original: Eskara Helsene was a "sourcerer" (not a misspelling) for the Orran Empire, which fought an all-out war against the Terrelan Empire and lost. Eskara and her best friend Josef, two of the only surviving Orran sourcerers, are captured and thrown into the Pit, a deep subterranean prison where the Terrelan Empire sends its worst criminals and war prisoners. There they are made to dig and dig and dig, for no discernible reason except to make them suffer. Prisoners are subjected to physical and psychological torture from the cruel overseers, and the Prisoner's Dilemma is not only played out repeatedly in very real ways but just in case it wasn't obvious enough, the author turns it into an explicit gambling game played by the prisoners.
Eventually, of course, Eskara learns of a possible way out. It requires her to choose her allies carefully, and she and her fellow escapees will have to make their way through even deeper levels of the Pit supposedly inhabited by monsters. Gosh, do you think they will encounter any monsters?
Yes, it's tropey. Yes, it's your basic prison escape caper + story of vengeance. Yes, the protagonist is an angry, angsty teenage girl who acts like such an idiot she really shouldn't survive, and yet the fact she does survive didn't feel like the author was giving her excessive amounts of plot armor, beyond the normal absurd luck you expect fantasy protagonists to benefit from. (It's no fun if the story ends because one of the mooks rolled a natural 20, as would inevitably happen eventually in a realistic story.)
Better, the dialog was fine and not too cringey, the worldbuilding was good, the prose was more than adequate, even really nice in places, and Eskara hooked me with her narrative. The author uses the device here of having the protagonist narrate her story in the past tense, from the perspective of a much older woman, years in the future. Lots of "I was such a fool" and "I wonder how much different things would be, had I killed him then..." So okay, we already know Eskara is going to survive. Not only that, future-Eskara drops a lot of juicy tidbits about the future into her narrative, things she is going to do or things that are going to happen that make you say "Wait, what?" Some readers may not like this rather blunt style of foreshadowing, but I actually enjoyed it because now I have to see just how the author is going to pull all that off in the next four books. And it made me believe angsty 15-year-old Eskara who at the end of this book swears she's going to make the world burn.
This was a highly satisfying fantasy novel that delivered everything it promised, and then promised more with future volumes. But let me go over a few things that elevated it above every other tropey fantasy novel trying to get your attention.
"I am the weapon."
First, technically I suppose this is a Young Adult novel, but it did not really read like one, teenage protagonist notwithstanding. Yes, Eskara is stupid, immature, hotheaded, and mouthy. Like a teenager. She's a 15-year-old girl who was identified at an early age as someone with magical talent and then trained to be a child soldier. She fought a brutal war before she even really knew what death is, and this is conveyed believably. Like, she has killed a lot of people in battle, so she's no innocent, and yet she's never had time to come to terms with what it meant to have been turned into a weapon. (Indeed, the mantra "I am the weapon" is something that was drilled into them precisely to prevent these young martial wizards from having to think too hard about what they were doing.) So there are points in Along the Razor's Edge where Eskara, even as angry and scary and violent as she can be, still balks at face-to-face murder because she really hasn't become a hardened killer yet. Likewise, she's a war veteran with blood on her hands who's been cast into a hellhole along with even more hardened adult criminals, and yet she's still capable of getting silly and stupid over her first real crush. There's a scene where she loses her virginity and it's... realistic, which is to say, she very quickly realizes that sex is not always all it's cracked up to be and that hot guy might be a real dud in an actual life-or-death situation.
Early in the book, as Eskara was talking about her service to the Orran Empire (there are occasional flashbacks-within-the-flashbacks as she talks about her time at the Orran Magical Academy), I started to wonder: just what makes her so loyal to the Orrans? Like, we know the Orrans fought the Terrelans and lost, but what made the Orrans the good guys and the Terrelans the bad guys, other than which side Eskara was on? Well, this very point is raised a couple of times in arguments with Josef, and eventually, it turns out that.... there really isn't much difference between them. It wasn't an Evil Empire invading a Good Empire (in fact, eventually Eskara mentions casually that the Orrans started the war), it was just two empires and Eskara happened to be on the losing side. I appreciated the fact that this is never explicitly spelled out for us, and yet over the course of the book that is one of the subtextual revelations that informs Eskara's character development. She was turned into a weapon by people who didn't deserve her loyalty. And yet, there are betrayals that still hurt.
"If there's one thing you remember from my story, one lesson you take from it, let it be this: Gods are fucking arseholes. All of them."
Finally, the worldbuilding, and the magical system. Rob J. Hayes is who Brandon Sanderson wants to be when he grows up. Yeah, yeah, people love them some Sanderson, and I've read a bunch of his books myself, and frankly, I thought in this one book, Hayes did the "building up a world with well-defined magical rules, monsters, and extra-planar beings" better. We know that there are (at least) twenty different "sources" of magic, that "sourcerers" can usually attune themselves to at most half a dozen, and they use magic by swallowing crystals which let them temporarily use them to do magic of the appropriate type (yes, this did remind me a bit of Allomancy from Sanderson's Mistborn series), but will also eventually kill them if they don't throw it up. And it will kill them quicker if it's the wrong source. Throw in a little demonic possession and Eskara casually mentioning gods and there's a ton of stuff hinted at but not yet detailed, and none of it felt like reciting lore off of a character sheet I'M LOOKING AT YOU AGAIN MR. SANDERSON!
I know I'm praising this book a lot but it just really grabbed me like few series-starters have, so I'm hoping the rest of the series doesn't let me down.
My complete list of book reviews.
self-published, 2020, 380 pages
An empire in flames. A prisoner of war. An unbreakable will to escape.
At just 15, Eskara Helsene fought in the greatest war mankind has ever known - and lost. There is only one place her enemies would send a Sourcerer as powerful as her: the Pit, a prison sunk so deep into the earth the sun is a distant memory. Now, she finds herself stripped of her magic; a young girl surrounded by thieves, murderers, and worse. In order to survive she will need to make new allies, play the inmates against each other, and find a way out.
Her enemies will soon find out that Eskara is not so easily broken.
I first heard of this book on some YouTube reviewer's channel who was promoting underrated fantasy novels he thought deserved more attention. I didn't even realize when I picked it up that it was self-published. My experience with self-published books has been hit or miss, but mostly miss. Self-publishing does not have the stigma it once did and more and more authors are actually making a living at it, but still, there are a thousand failures for every author who catches an audience, and even highly popular series like Cradle and Worm have fallen flat for me, reading like fan-fiction that became popular because it was full of nerdgasmic geek-stroking.
I wasn't expecting much, is what I'm saying. And on the surface, Along the Razor's Edge appeared to be a grimdark fantasy tropapalooza: teenage girl who used to be a powerful sorcerer but gets thrown into a fantasy prison and has to fight her way out, swearing vengeance bwahahaha.
Holy fuck, I loved this book. I loved this book so much I might just jump the next book ahead of the queue on my TBR list.
The premise is not highly original: Eskara Helsene was a "sourcerer" (not a misspelling) for the Orran Empire, which fought an all-out war against the Terrelan Empire and lost. Eskara and her best friend Josef, two of the only surviving Orran sourcerers, are captured and thrown into the Pit, a deep subterranean prison where the Terrelan Empire sends its worst criminals and war prisoners. There they are made to dig and dig and dig, for no discernible reason except to make them suffer. Prisoners are subjected to physical and psychological torture from the cruel overseers, and the Prisoner's Dilemma is not only played out repeatedly in very real ways but just in case it wasn't obvious enough, the author turns it into an explicit gambling game played by the prisoners.
Eventually, of course, Eskara learns of a possible way out. It requires her to choose her allies carefully, and she and her fellow escapees will have to make their way through even deeper levels of the Pit supposedly inhabited by monsters. Gosh, do you think they will encounter any monsters?
Yes, it's tropey. Yes, it's your basic prison escape caper + story of vengeance. Yes, the protagonist is an angry, angsty teenage girl who acts like such an idiot she really shouldn't survive, and yet the fact she does survive didn't feel like the author was giving her excessive amounts of plot armor, beyond the normal absurd luck you expect fantasy protagonists to benefit from. (It's no fun if the story ends because one of the mooks rolled a natural 20, as would inevitably happen eventually in a realistic story.)
Better, the dialog was fine and not too cringey, the worldbuilding was good, the prose was more than adequate, even really nice in places, and Eskara hooked me with her narrative. The author uses the device here of having the protagonist narrate her story in the past tense, from the perspective of a much older woman, years in the future. Lots of "I was such a fool" and "I wonder how much different things would be, had I killed him then..." So okay, we already know Eskara is going to survive. Not only that, future-Eskara drops a lot of juicy tidbits about the future into her narrative, things she is going to do or things that are going to happen that make you say "Wait, what?" Some readers may not like this rather blunt style of foreshadowing, but I actually enjoyed it because now I have to see just how the author is going to pull all that off in the next four books. And it made me believe angsty 15-year-old Eskara who at the end of this book swears she's going to make the world burn.
This was a highly satisfying fantasy novel that delivered everything it promised, and then promised more with future volumes. But let me go over a few things that elevated it above every other tropey fantasy novel trying to get your attention.
"I am the weapon."
First, technically I suppose this is a Young Adult novel, but it did not really read like one, teenage protagonist notwithstanding. Yes, Eskara is stupid, immature, hotheaded, and mouthy. Like a teenager. She's a 15-year-old girl who was identified at an early age as someone with magical talent and then trained to be a child soldier. She fought a brutal war before she even really knew what death is, and this is conveyed believably. Like, she has killed a lot of people in battle, so she's no innocent, and yet she's never had time to come to terms with what it meant to have been turned into a weapon. (Indeed, the mantra "I am the weapon" is something that was drilled into them precisely to prevent these young martial wizards from having to think too hard about what they were doing.) So there are points in Along the Razor's Edge where Eskara, even as angry and scary and violent as she can be, still balks at face-to-face murder because she really hasn't become a hardened killer yet. Likewise, she's a war veteran with blood on her hands who's been cast into a hellhole along with even more hardened adult criminals, and yet she's still capable of getting silly and stupid over her first real crush. There's a scene where she loses her virginity and it's... realistic, which is to say, she very quickly realizes that sex is not always all it's cracked up to be and that hot guy might be a real dud in an actual life-or-death situation.
Early in the book, as Eskara was talking about her service to the Orran Empire (there are occasional flashbacks-within-the-flashbacks as she talks about her time at the Orran Magical Academy), I started to wonder: just what makes her so loyal to the Orrans? Like, we know the Orrans fought the Terrelans and lost, but what made the Orrans the good guys and the Terrelans the bad guys, other than which side Eskara was on? Well, this very point is raised a couple of times in arguments with Josef, and eventually, it turns out that.... there really isn't much difference between them. It wasn't an Evil Empire invading a Good Empire (in fact, eventually Eskara mentions casually that the Orrans started the war), it was just two empires and Eskara happened to be on the losing side. I appreciated the fact that this is never explicitly spelled out for us, and yet over the course of the book that is one of the subtextual revelations that informs Eskara's character development. She was turned into a weapon by people who didn't deserve her loyalty. And yet, there are betrayals that still hurt.
"If there's one thing you remember from my story, one lesson you take from it, let it be this: Gods are fucking arseholes. All of them."
Finally, the worldbuilding, and the magical system. Rob J. Hayes is who Brandon Sanderson wants to be when he grows up. Yeah, yeah, people love them some Sanderson, and I've read a bunch of his books myself, and frankly, I thought in this one book, Hayes did the "building up a world with well-defined magical rules, monsters, and extra-planar beings" better. We know that there are (at least) twenty different "sources" of magic, that "sourcerers" can usually attune themselves to at most half a dozen, and they use magic by swallowing crystals which let them temporarily use them to do magic of the appropriate type (yes, this did remind me a bit of Allomancy from Sanderson's Mistborn series), but will also eventually kill them if they don't throw it up. And it will kill them quicker if it's the wrong source. Throw in a little demonic possession and Eskara casually mentioning gods and there's a ton of stuff hinted at but not yet detailed, and none of it felt like reciting lore off of a character sheet I'M LOOKING AT YOU AGAIN MR. SANDERSON!
I know I'm praising this book a lot but it just really grabbed me like few series-starters have, so I'm hoping the rest of the series doesn't let me down.
My complete list of book reviews.