“Sefia knows what it means to survive. After her father is brutally murdered, she flees into the
wilderness with her aunt Nin, who teaches her to hunt, track, and steal. But when Nin is kidnapped,
leaving Sefia completely alone, none of her survival skills can help her discover where Nin's been
taken, or if she's even alive. The only clue to both her aunt's disappearance and her father's murder
is the odd rectangular object her father left behind, an object she comes to realize is a book-a marvelous item unheard of in her otherwise illiterate society. With the help of this book, and the aid of a mysterious stranger with dark secrets of his own, Sefia sets out to rescue her aunt and find out what really happened the day her father was killed-and punish the people responsible.”
I highly recommend the book to everyone who likes the genres mentioned above and if you don’t want to get spoiled please stop reading and BUY THE BOOK.
SPOILER DOWN BELOW
These days, a lot of plot is so similar to another that the story blur into each other and you sometimes even forget what you’re reading in the first place. Happens to me quite often but that’s also due the fact that my usual attention span is like, 5 seconds. This got worse over the years but what can I do.
This being said, it did not happen once while I read the books. It takes one of two things for me to be complete absorbed into a story
A). The story is so entertainingly written that I have fun while reading and/or the character dynamics are so interesting that I keep reading to see how the relationship develops.
B). There are some sort of secrets in between the lines and I really, really want to find them.
These books had both. Interesting, intricate relationships and fully developed story strings that deserve whole books of their own. Multi-faceted characters with interesting lives and A LOT of diversity. Speaking of diversity, I personally feel like some authors implement their LGBTQ+ characters in a way that sometimes just doesn’t feel natural or even just plain forced. Again, not the case with this book, the non hetero relationships were constructed carefully and the dynamics felt real and heartbreakingly beautiful.
Even the love relationship between Sefia and Archer, the two main characters, is great and the pain the two experience is displayed perfectly and doesn’t feel unnecessary because the story actually wouldn’t work if they were just “really good friends”.
I mentioned above that there are a lot of different strings of story and characters that at first don’t have anything to do with each other. The way Chee managed to fiddle all these different strings together into the best character-connection-net I’ve ever seen amazes me.
We have Sefia and Archer, an infamous pirate captain, a wanna-be sailor, a dying king and his lover and many, many more. This feels overwhelming at first but once you understand the concept of the book, it all makes sense.
Speaking of which, the concept. The fucking concept. It says on the first page (this is translated roughly into English, I only have the German book) the following
“Hello
If you’re reading these words, you may know that you have to read all of it. And maybe you know that you have to read really carefully. Because between the lines there is magic and a bit of witchcraft. And once you learn how to find secrets in the dust and how to discover the secrets of the ocean, then you learn what it means to be reading.
This is a book. You are the reader. Look closely. This is magic.”
The only thing Sefia has left from her parents is a book.
Some pages of the actual book the reader is reading seem to be pages of the book Sefia has and there are secrets woven into the letters and pages. Bolt letters form warnings or names of things that will happen in the future. Some pages have written words on the bottom of the page and these form a poem.
The Sefia is magical. If you know how to use it, it shows you what happened, what is happening right now, and also what will happen. And there is a mantra repeated throughout the book, the sentiment that whatever is written down WILL eventually happen. And while at first you don’t really notice what this means at all, you later realize that this is what is happening EVERY TIME you read a book. If you are on page 50 of a 400 page book, the characters’ destinies are already written, literally.
Sefia struggles with this reality throughout the books and at first you don’t think much of it but at some point you as the reader, the one who wants to read a good ending, you realize and understand BEFORE THE CHARACTER IN THE BOOK that some endings are inevitable. This hurts, the ending hurts but any other ending would have destroyed the story and to be fair, you basically learn how the whole story will end during the first book but that doesn’t make the story in between the start and end or in between the lines less captivating.
Are you the reader or the read is also a big theme in the book and it makes sense. With the book, Sefia can see what will happen and she basically reads what will happen to her and the people around her. But sometimes the book doesn’t show all of the stories she wants to see but only snippets. The book is magical.
Kelanna, the world the story takes place, isn’t as magical. There are 5 nations spread over 5 islands and gigantic oceans between them. Stories are shared trough speaking since there is no known alphabet and the inhabitants don’t believe in ghosts or mourn the dead. When someone dies, their corpse will be laid down on a boat, set on fire and send away on the ocean.
Even explaining doesn’t really take the magic of these books away. Please read the books. They are so good and I was captivated to an extent I never thought I’d reach ever.
