By Blood, By Salt
The Land of Exile series, Book 1J. L. Odom
Azimuth
Fiction, Fantasy
**+ (Bad/Okay)
DESCRIPTION:
Azelta has been a debt soldier, a veritable slave, for thirteen years, assigned to the Maurowan imperial army company of the Black Wrens. His crime? Being a penniless, homeless boy in a Maurowan city - and being a "jackal," as the Mashevi people are known. Many desert cultures have been cast under Emperor Riada's shadow and those of the bloodthirsty Maurowan gods, but the Mashevi had the audacity to resist, if unsuccessfully. Now, even though Azelta has proven himself an exemplary soldier and earned the captain's trust, even allowed to wear a blade (normally forbidden for jackals), he will never be a full person, never be a citizen, not even after finishing out his debt sentence in seven more years. He will always and forevermore be just a jackal, a subhuman... unless he takes a bold chance at something more.
No empire is without political struggle and rivalry, and the Maurowans are no different. The Emperor's quiet brother has become a nexus of rumor and speculation by those who would oust Riada, a focus of brewing rebellion, and those forces have reached the Black Wren. Riada now wishes to quell all questions of his might and the power of the crown (and their gods) by sending soldiers into the wild southern reaches of the Sahr to capture a "jinn," one of the rumored devil creatures said to dwell there, which even the native cultures fear. If Maurowans can capture a devil, if the empire can prove it can dominate even these monsters, surely none will question their righteous, divine rule ever again. But the jinn the Black Wrens finally capture is nothing at all like anyone expects - and in it Azelta sees the opportunity he has waited over a decade to find.
REVIEW:
I gave this a try because I was looking for something a bit different and I saw it recommended on a BookTube channel I was skimming. At first, it seemed to deliver that, an epic in the making with a richly realized setting and myriad intricate cultures that mix and (mostly) clash in numerous ways. The writing also had a somewhat poetic overtone, with frequent intriguing turns of phrase. If it seemed to be taking its own sweet time getting to anything like what the back cover promised in the way of a plot, and if the characters seemed far more defined by whom they hated and dehumanized and plotted against and the faiths they clung to (or considered blasphemous)... well, it was early on, and surely I'd grow to, if not love, at least be invested in the fate of someone.
I kept waiting for that investment to materialize. Given the rating, it's not much of a spoiler to say that it never did.
The author draws on their background as a linguist and experiences as a serving Marine to create some truly impressive cultural work. Each character sees almost a different world from their points of view, often lowering those of other cultures to mere "its" rather than men or women. Even those who are cordial with Azelta are too ready to slip back into calling him a "jackal" and ask him to keep his head down and bide his time and maybe someday he'll earn the respect that the vast majority of the world will never give him because of his accent and skin tone and beliefs and all the other markers that show him to be a despised Mashevi. Even other cultures that have been stomped down by the Maurowan empire (and as an aside, I really struggled at the start with how similarly "Mashevi" and "Maurowan" scanned) hate the jackals, seemingly above and beyond all other peoples of the desert, with the exception of the "jinn" of the Sahr, a race so secretive and hated that they're made out to be literal devils. How burdened Azelta is, how stiffly loyal to the nebulous god of his people (the only one that only goes by God, oddly enough) and the customs of a culture he has been isolated from for the majority of his life, how unjust the whole world is to him in particular, yet see how he perseveres and bites down on the bitterness, how superior he surely is in spirit to the men surrounding him. (And it is almost exclusively men; there are only a few women involved at all, and of them they serve basically no purpose and seem utterly forgotten about by the end - save one, the Sahr "jinn," who is a cunning and selfish and devious being and possibly the only one more tormented than Azelta, though specifics of her origins and goals are maddeningly vague... and it's strongly implied that, if she really is a "devil" and "damned," then of course she must've deserved it.)
In any event, things slowly meander up to the expedition to the Sahr lands, which has some nicely stark and tense moments even before they encounter the hostile natives... and then they actually capture the "jinn" and the tale bogs right back down again, going back to wallowing in misery and the many clashing cultures, pretty much all of whom hate everyone else for not being like themselves and only are "friends" so long as they can use a body, if that long.
Throughout, the author plays their cards far too close to their chest on several accounts, shutting me out from too much and preventing me from actually caring about anyone or wanting them to succeed. While the players could be interesting initially, I eventually found them more frustrating than intriguing, especially when I was clearly not being allowed enough information to figure out why any of it could possibly matter. So what if the coup succeeds or fails? So what if Azelta is executed for impunity or not? So what if the Sahr woman is actually a damned soul who only wants to confront the god or gods who cursed her... or maybe not? Toward the very end were a few revelations that would've meant a lot more if they'd been built up properly, but the little buildup had happened way at the beginning of the book, so I'd long forgotten about it and had to do some mental backtracking to figure out why I should find the revelations important. It's like springing the punchline to a joke several days after offhandedly muttering about chickens crossing roads; by the time the listener even remembers the question, the laugh just isn't really going to be there. And by the conclusion the whole thing had taken certain plot turns that made me suspect that it had been intended to be more religious fiction than the fantasy epic I'd thought it was (something about a tormented potential leader of a scattered culture persistently placing faith in the only deity named "God" among packs of idol-worshipping heathens seeking specifically to oppress and exterminate the faithful... but maybe I'm reading too much into it, perhaps for lack of actually finding specific in-book characters or things to hold my interest long enough to maintain suspension of disbelief and separation from my own world).
It's this last point, the sense of bait-and-switch, that ultimately sank the rating below the flat Okay. While I could appreciate the detailed cultures created and how each person had their own particular beliefs and moralities reflected in their chapters, I just felt alienated by all the backstabbing and front-stabbing and general, seemingly insurmountable prejudices and hatred that soured everyone and everything. The whole lot of them could've been swept off the map in a sandstorm and it would've made the tale much brighter. (And, seriously, would it have killed the author to write one woman who actually mattered and wasn't implied to be literally cursed and damned by whatever god or gods ruled the world? Why bother including female characters at all, if that's all they are?)
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