Review: Obsidian Awakening

In June, I began reading the first chapters of every entry to this year’s Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off (SPFBO9), a competition designed to highlight the best in self-published fantasy. From these 300 first chapters, I selected about 30 books (10%) where I wanted to read on, with the intention of only reviewing the books I finished and enjoyed.

Obsidian: Awakening by Sienna Frost is my first review from the SPFBO9 entries**. A grimdark epic fantasy inspired by the dryland cultures of the Mongolian nomads and Bedouins, it’s got multiple POV characters from both sides in a war between the Shakshi desert nomads of the White Desert, and the more-city-based Salasar Empire.

The first chapter of Obsidian: Awakening blew my mind. 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. And other reviews said it’s very dark. So, I decided I had to be in the right mood…

Obsidian: Awakening is NOT THAT DARK

Having said that, I was debating on the subtitle of this review. It was a toss-up between ‘Genghis Khan with roses and thorns’ and ‘Obsidian: Awakening is NOT THAT DARK’. If we use a George-R-R-Martin-ometer, where ‘fluffy romantic comedy about cake-baking dragons’ is a One and ‘murdering your only heroic character at the end of book one’ is a Ten, Obsidian: Awakening is a clear Seven.

I think it’s correct to say that Obsidian: Awakening is grim and dark, but not grimdark, and it’s not even especially grim. When I think of ‘grim’ fantasy, I’m always imagining ’dung age medieval Western Europe’, which unspoilt desert definitely is not.

It’s also definitely a book about passion, companionship and desire. Whether it’s also about ‘romance’ depends on whether you mean ‘dramatic gestures as an outpouring of sexually-driven emotion’ or ‘the subgenre of romantic fiction, with all its tropes’.

Genghis Khan with roses and thorns

The opening chapter features warlord/conqueror/heir to the Salasar Empire, prince Muradi, who has just slaughtered a tonne of Shakshi on a campaign in the White Desert. He is charming, highly intelligent, educated, athletic, as hot as all fuck (conventionally speaking) and, Zahara, a princess of the Shakshi is brought into his tent while he’s stripping naked and washing himself off (while covered in her people’s blood, obviously).

He wants to know the location of her people’s sacred city*** (so he can massacre the shit out of them). She hates his guts. Or, rather, her point-of-view tells the reader she hates his guts. As the only description you’re getting of this man is from her own perspective, she doesn’t 100% hate his guts. More 50% hatred and 50% overwhelming lust. Oh, yes, and then he decides to marry her as a punishment (and kill a prisoner everytime she disobeys).

You can see where this is going, right…

No actual penetration happened in the opening, or even anything overtly sexual, but the chemistry between these two characters was so intensely scorching, I had to dunk my Kindle in a bucket of water afterwards to cool it down. And, when the chapter ended, beautifully written, there was no way that any straight woman with my diseased and twisted mind could NOT want to read the rest of this book…

And they didn’t all die at the end…

The rest of the book takes place about twenty years later than the first chapter, at a time when - now Salar Muradi, ruler of the Salasar Empire, is considering taking another crack at conquering the rest of the White Desert. The book follows multiple point-of-view characters, including male escort and assassin Hasheem (who is very pretty), Shakshi princess Djari, her brother Nazir (who is very pretty), and Muradi and Zahara’s son, Lasura (who is also, I think, very pretty).

The plot is largely political as Djari and Lasura, in particular, are brought together by destiny/prophecy to stop the war. The points of view shift around, following a plotline rather than being driven by the characters, with the focus increasingly switching from Salasar to the White Desert.

It’s hard to describe the exact plot, largely because it’s mostly setting up the multiple character arcs for future books. Nonetheless, it’s extremely entertaining, with many tense situations and action scenes often involving manly characters being exceptionally manly (although Djari does get to be badass riding bareback on a horse). 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.

In general, there’s lots of drama keeping things moving along, especially towards the end where [spoilers] I assumed most the point-of-view characters were going to get killed because THAT’S WHAT I’D HAVE DONE… and then, slightly disappointingly, they weren’t [/spoilers]. It was at this point that I realised it wasn’t, actually, very dark.

Anyway, regardless of GRRM-ometer level, it was gripping enough that I immediately checked to see if Book Two was out (it isn’t), and I’ll definitely add to the many people rating Obsidian: Awakening 4.5/4.6 on GoodReads.

Characters -vs- authors… fight, fight, fight…

Obsidian: Awakening is very much one of those books where the author’s voice carries the narrative. How much you like Obsidian: Awakening will depend on how much you enjoy Sienna’s worldview and unique writing voice.

I thoroughly enjoyed the worldbuilding, intrigue and narrative voice, but I did notice that most characters were highly opinionated, hardcore, vengeful and determined, including those not of desert stock (I will leave a link here to the ACOUP Fremen Mirage blogpost series on why, exactly, real-world poor desert cultures are NOT historically superior to high-tech civilisations due to their epic hardcore). No one was shy, naive, retiring, quiet or bookish because, of course, the world was set up so they would have died before the book started. The men were also uniformly hardcore, beautiful-looking, and prone to making expansive speeches about the importance of struggle to forging character.

The Shakshi were a group of beautiful, athletic desert warriors who expressed excessive honour, causing them to threaten to cut off each other limbs’ (did not actually happen), and fight each other constantly over minor slights. The Salasar Empire was… well, pretty similar, but without the threats of limb cutting. In short, they were mostly the same bunch of people.

This wasn’t a problem, in practice, due to the skill of the narration, but you do need to be totally up for immersing yourselves in Sienna’s epic storytelling - where most of the characters are, in fact, well-written variations on Proud Warrior Race Guy/Gal.

Blood in the sand, on her father‘s swords…

In the introduction to Obsidian: Awakening, Sienna says that the book was inspired by her time spent with the Bedouin of Jordan and Egypt, Mongolian nomads, as well as time spent travelling the Gobi Desert, in Petra, Wadi Rum, and the White Desert of Egypt.

The Shakshi culture was painted with powerful and loving brushstrokes, with a sense from language, clothes and other details that there's a world much deeper than what's shown on the page. A huge amount of political, historical and geographical detail of the Shakshi and their home, the White Desert, is sewn into the story without ever feeling clumsy, confusing or involving an info dump. Words, such as Kha’gan arrive naturally within the text, with meaning obvious from context.

Given the difficulty of providing information in fiction, this is a true testament to Sienna’s talent as an author.

The intimidating beauty of a place unseen...

And here I come to the downsides of the story (for me, anyway). They are all pedantic, as you'd expect from a book I enjoyed. Less criticism than a reader's greed for more, more, MORE in future novels.

The White Desert and Shakshi culture had an immense sense of place. Given the depth of the politics, I wanted the Salasar Empire to be fleshed out in similar detail. I wanted more culture, more religion, more philosophy… more of an existential, ideological clash between the warring sides, not just a conflict driven by the personal desires of Salar Muradi (and, I assume, his dad).

Not because Obsidian: Awakening was badly world-built, but the absolute opposite. I know Sienna is capable of writing deep philosophical conflicts, not just personal ones, and, thus, when I sensed that gap in the worldbuilding, I craved to experience… more.

There were tantalising hints of a world beyond what was shown on the page, such as the railing-less balcony on the upper floors of the iconic Black Tower of Rashawri, or the fleeting reference to an ankle-length tunic for a religious sacrifice in the city temple. But I never really understood how living in a desert - vs - living in a city gave the people of the White Desert and Rashawri such similar martial cultures and outlooks. In the real world, different societies, with different military technologies develop very different martial cultures, with horse archer-using nomad cultures being unlike anything else.

There were occasional mentions of the inhabitants of Rashawri being softer than desert dwellers but, in practice, I never really noticed any difference in approach. This was particularly noticeable with Hasheem, a Shakshi who'd lived most of his life in Rashawri, but who seemed to adjust remarkably quickly to living in Djari's White Desert Kha'gan.

The focus of the story wasn't really on Rashawri. Maybe these details, only hinted at in this book, will get fleshed out in the sequel. If so, I thoroughly look forwards to reading that.

I have mused for decades upon the boundaries of my empire, the design of my obsidian tower, but never upon you… my love.

A minor disappointment, for me, was the relationship between Zahara and Muradi. I’m probably being more critical with Obsidian:Awakening than I would be with a book I liked less, purely because I did enjoy that first chapter so much. And because I have a similar antagonistic-erotic relationship in my own work-in-progress novel between a mercenary pilot, and the warlord who hires and tries to kill her near the beginning of the book.

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. After two years, maybe? But these characters are in their forties, they fancy each other, and their worldviews would have been constantly evolving during the decades since their first meeting. Somehow, even if they only met up occasionally to exchange bodily fluids, they would have made some progress with this shit.

As it was, it felt like neither of them had the emotional intelligence to stop the game playing, and - rather than being determinedly vengeful - Zahara seemed merely petty. As he was threatening her people, she would have either developed Stockholm Syndrome or subtly poisoned him (and she wouldn’t be the only suspect) long before twenty years was up. I couldn’t understand why Muradi never seemed to get bored of her game playing either, when he has twenty years and plenty of other women. If he really wanted to make her surrender, he could just torture her. He’s set up, after all, as an utterly ruthless man who executes political opponents by throwing them off a railless balcony.

It’s on this rare occasion that I wondered if having fewer point-of-view characters in Obsidian: Awakening would have worked better, not because the story didn’t flow well (it did), but just to give the time for Zahara and Muradi to work through their issues more realistically on the page. After all, if fictional characters were real humans, they would occasionally muse in the despairing hours of the night, "how do I convince this woman to stop wanting to stab me?" Given how intelligent and capable Muradi is, you'd have expected him to make substantive progress on this point.

“He is a superficial, stupid shit…” he said, subtly.

On that topic, most of the characters are damnably blunt most of the time, expressing very frank, often sweary, opinions about other characters in a way that didn’t feel entirely realistic for Games-of-Throne-esque political operators. A particularly noticeable example is below, which I still can’t work out whether was intended to be ironic or deadly serious:

Again, this wasn’t because it was a bad book. It was such a good book that I was expecting the multiple point-of-view characters in positions of power to engage in George R. R. Martin-level intrigue, and it distracted me when they didn’t. That said, Sienna Frost keeps a much more manageable number of characters than GRRM and, as a straight woman, I much prefer an excessive focus on describing hot, half-naked horse archers to lengthy descriptions of hot, freshly-roasted boar…

In the end…

In conclusion, I’d definitely give this book at least 4.6/4.7. However, I feel there two novels stapled together - one which deserves a clear 5.0 (the Zahara-Muradi romance) and the other that probably warrants a 4.9 (the milieu-rich desert military fantasy).

While my husband and I were copyediting this review, he kept quizzing me about why I couldn’t summarise the plot. I realised it was because the desert plot involving Djari/Lasura/Hasheem didn’t contribute to the climax of the novel (it may set up the sequel). Instead, the resolution of the book was driven by the delayed working through of the Zahara-Muradi romance. I think it would have been even better structurally to let either of those plotlines work through at a natural pace.

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. Apparently, it’s pretty common in debut/early novels. It’s not that Obsidian: Awakening is a bad book (it’s a phenomenal novel), but I think it would have been a clear 5.0 if - like Dan in the final of the Great British Bake-Off - it had tried to do less, and not more.

**River in the Galaxy by Natalie Kelda, which I reviewed a few months back, was also in SPFBO9, but I read it before I did the first chapter reads. It was actually the high quality of Natalie’s book that encouraged me to investigate SPFBO9 further.

** * My husband, copyediting my blogpost, pointed out that something that doesn’t move and is as large as a prosperous sacred city can’t be hidden without powerful magic (not in evidence yet in this setting). The number of people who would need to know roughly where Citara was (and roughly is enough because you would be able to see it from ten miles off) means that the location just couldn’t be kept secret. Even if the Salasar didn’t have maps, the empire’s spy network could just pay a trader from a neutral nation - like Makena - to give them a rough idea, and then follow the roads/merchants/aqueducts right up to the gate. With being in a desert, the city would also need to draw resources from an enormous area, probably by boat. I’ve got to say I didn’t notice this issue myself, however, and it didn’t affect my enjoyment of the novel.