I've had some reads in the past where it seemed like the author was just going for that shock value and it didn't really seem to add much to the story itself. 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). Quotations just aren’t the same out of context, and the characters are so rich, the story so layered and complex! I was simultaneously rushing through it out of pure addiction, and also trying to delay the inevitable ending. On the other side of the desert, Zahara, captured bride of Salar Muradi, Djari’s enemy and the empire’s undefeated ruler, discovers her husband’s only weakness in the form of his conflicting feelings for her.

These themes are explored through the characters and the personal and political wars they wage, the oaths they take, the betrayals they face, and the pride, devotion, retribution, anger, guilt and shame which drives them. 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.The personal and political stakes are high for everyone and the book is seething and simmering with external and internal conflict on so many levels as the characters fight with each other and themselves. What leaders must do not only to maintain power, but to protect, shelter, clothe and feed, and inspire their people. 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 . Moreover, Frost adeptly gives us several main characters who are on opposite sides of a long and bitter conflict.

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. The power to change the course of history rests in their hands, whether they know it or not, and now they are forced to choose between their duty/destiny and their personal desires.

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. I feel like it has become rather popular these days, especially in grimdark fantasy, to describe characters as morally grey, but I honestly feel like describing these characters in that manner would be doing them a disservice. We get to explore both the most tender, innocent and passionate expressions of love, while simultaneously being confronted with the most ugly, toxic and unhealthy forms of it.

The world history and cultural traditions give meaning to every action and the story is all the more believable and resonant for it. If you are a fantasy fan looking to explore self pubbed work, I think this is the perfect opportunity. Every scene plays on the characters and their relationships (some of which honestly deserve my use of the word "smouldering").Nazir had known then, as he made those five steps toward their first time together, how powerless he was against the hands of Fate or whatever gods who had drawn a line for them to meet, only to have things end up the way they were now or were going to end in the future. For Hasheem, life has been a serious of circumstances that force him into situations where he is offered the choice to die or give up more of his freedom, and he keeps on giving up more of his freedom, not because he is a coward, and he always wonders how he will regret his decision. 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? Their sexuality is never a point of contention in the story and also doesn’t become their entire personality, which I found made that representation feel so authentic and refreshing.

No words, no descriptions for emotions describe that moment when Muradi learns of what Jarem is doing behind his back. The prince demands the woman, named Zahara, a proud tribal member of the fierce and nomadic Kha’gans, reveal the well-guarded secret location of Citara, a coveted stronghold, and threatens that he will give her over to all of his soldiers to be brutally raped and killed if she does not comply.What I will say, however, is that the plotting involves a super complex spiderweb of threads between characters and events.