Reviews with content warning for Rape - First, Become Ashes

Reviews tagging 'Rape'

First, Become Ashes by K.M. Szpara

35 reviews

tabbiecat's review against another edition

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dark hopeful fast-paced

Diverse cast of characters? Yes

1.25

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spaceoperatics's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional hopeful reflective fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

A very fun take on magic, family, and clashing perspectives. Take the content warnings seriously.

The ending comes on too suddenly and too cleanly, otherwise it might be a 5-star.

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marstarr's review against another edition

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challenging dark funny mysterious sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

Hmm. I think this book almost does something, but it just fell short. There was such tonal whiplash in parts and it felt like it was handling really heavy and intense topics without sufficient care and without having it *mean* something. I just think if you’re going to do that much on-page rape and torture there has to be some sort of proper catharsis or narrative satisfaction at the end. I have to wonder who the intended audience is for this book, because I have to admit that it was not me

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headlessphilosopher's review

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adventurous dark emotional fast-paced

5.0

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blacksphinx's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

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six9's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

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femme4fleurs's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

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caitforshort's review against another edition

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dark fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes

1.0

Look. I did this to myself. I knew I wasn't going to like this book, because I hated Docile and thought it fundamentally failed to engage with ideas of race, slavery, abuse, and consent in any kind of meaningful way, but I saw the premise of First Become Ashes and I was curious. I checked it out of the library. I suffered.

To be fair, while I found First Become Ashes considerably less readable than Docile, it was also less offensively upsetting. It didn't engage with state-sanctioned slavery and therefore didn't set itself up for failure in terms of the legacy of racism and anti-Black violence in the United States; it did depict, very graphically, sexual and physical abuse, but it made slightly more of an effort to depict those things in non-titillating ways. It had explicitly queer characters, including an explicitly non-binary character, on the page. That said, I think that's about where the good parts end.

Let's start with the thing that everyone mentions about this book: the sexual violence. Wow the sexual violence. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with depicting sexual violence, abuse, manipulation, brainwashing, or self-harm in literature. Those things happen in real life and I think it's important to engage with them. I don’t have a problem with erotica, or books that have flimsy plots and lots of sex. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with consensual BDSM, in real life or on the page. This book, however, does not engage with any of these topics well. In the span of about 300 pages, we have

two of our protagonists (Kane and Lark) seriously injuring each other and/or themselves at the behest of a cult leader to charge up their “magic”, our third protagonist (Calvin) brutally beating Lark at Lark’s behest to charge up Lark’s “magic” and then never bringing it up again, Lark being raped by a cult elder while Kane watches and gets hard, Kane being raped by the cult leader so she can collect his semen, and description after description of the forced chastity cages Kane and Lark wear

. The characters do, to the book’s credit, either eventually or immediately admit that all of this is horrifying and abusive; however, the ramifications of this horrifying abuse are never dealt with (these characters would be so unbelievably traumatized) and the horrifying abuse is often written in a way that straddles an uncomfortable line between depicting rape and abuse to examine it and depicting rape and abuse as titillating or shocking. You can't just say that sexual violence is bad while simultaneously writing it in a way that feels like it's meant to be sexy.

Next up, let’s talk about the worldbuilding, because my god is it bad. First Become Ashes centers on a cult run by a woman named Nova; the members of the cult are completely isolated from the outside world and believe that the outside world is overrun with FOEs (Forces of Evil), who are controlled by monsters. At age twenty-five, cult members are sent out into the world to kill monsters. However, this book would have dramatically benefited from any kind of research on how cults function and what survivors of cults go through, because nothing about the cult (or the FBI investigation of the cult) holds together. For example:

Nova somehow purchased an entire plot of land that used to be a zoo in the middle of Baltimore, turned it into a compound that no one was allowed to enter or leave, told her followers to shoot at helicopters with arrows, and was never stopped. The FBI and other governmental agencies were aware that children in the compound were not being documented or sent to school and that people were being essentially held prisoner, and no one did anything for at least twenty-five years, because, what…they didn’t have an insider to testify? It was private land? I have no idea.
There is no way on god’s green earth that an FBI agent who
was the daughter of a cult leader
would be allowed to kick off an investigation into said cult leader’s cult, lead a raid on the cult and keep the members in pseudo-detention at a random hotel, and then chase after an escaped cult member with two other former cult members and no backup or supervision. It would not happen. It undercut so much of the tension in the book through sheer implausibility.
The intricacies of how people were convinced to join the cult and then how Nova kept them there were never explained. She told the original members she had magic, which got them to join, but she somehow managed to convince them that the outside world was full of monsters and FOEs even though presumably they had lived in the outside world for most of their lives. She took children away from their parents and trained them with swords and potions to fight monsters, but the only example of how she kept parents from protesting was that she un-Anointed the children of parents who resisted (basically, took away their status as special monster hunters). None of this makes sense.
Cult members were sometimes ignorant of very basic things (straws, the internet, dogs) but very aware of other things (cars, highways, pronoun usage). It was beyond jarring to have a member of an abusive sex cult introduce himself as “Lark, he/him” while telling people on the street that he was there to save them from monsters. I want nonbinary representation in books. I want trans representation in books. I don’t want that representation to feel disingenously and almost offensively shoehorned in. Is Nova, abusive sex cult leader and child rapist, somehow progressive enough to teach all her disciples about gender identity?
The magic. Calling the magic in this book a magic system is generous — at no point is it clear how magic functions, where it comes from, what its limitations are, what it can do, or how real it is. A huge driving force in the book is Calvin, random cosplayer who meets Lark by accident, trying to figure out if magic is real, while Kane simulatenously tries to figure out if the magic he’d grown up believing in was a lie.
Nova told the cult that magic comes from pain, and she forced cult members to hurt each other to fuel their magic; it would make sense, given this, that magic isn’t real, and that it’s a tactic she uses to make herself special and worth following. However, it’s clear that Lark’s magic is actually real, although sometimes his spells work and sometimes they don’t. He can heal wounds, unlock doors, cast protective wards, influence peoples’ thoughts, and communicate telepathically, all with magic. At the end of the book, he kills an enormous monster that emerges from a rift in the highway, and there’s no indication that this is meant to be a metaphor. It’s implied, towards the end, that magic doesn’t actually come from pain, but if magic is real, then Nova did, to some extent, possess secret and incredible knowledge; this wildly undercuts any point the book is trying to make about brainwashing, manipulation, and abuse.

The characters were also, across the board, flimsy and two-dimensional. Lark was an absolute zealot until suddenly he realized, just because

Calvin had really good sex with him

, that what he’d gone through was abuse. At no point does this realization seem to trouble him much. Calvin is a one-note cosplayer willing to

go on the run from the FBI and become a wanted fugitive on the off-chance that an escaped, armed cult member has real magic

, and the endless references to Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings were exhausting — we get it, he’s a nerd. Kane’s chapters revealed the abuse he and Lark went through, but didn’t do much else; Deryn, the fourth POV character, was fine, but didn’t have much depth or add much to the story. Calvin’s best friend Lilian only exists to make quippy, culturally relevant comments; Nova barely shows up at all and is, I think, in custody for most of the book. The rest of the cult members, one can only assume, remain stuck in Baltimore’s finest cult detention hotel.

And, to top it all off, the peripheral passersby seem bafflingly willing to help Lark, armed cult escapee on a journey to kill monsters, avoid the police. They feed him, clothe him, post Instagram stories supporting him, and literally barricade a highway so the FBI can’t get to him. Helping him is treated like helping an oppressed person and the language used to talk about it is very anti-cop, in the specific way that modern progressive activists might be anti-cop. I am all for anti-cop rhetoric and this felt like a wildly disingenous use of it.

Sometimes I don’t like books for personal, subjective reasons. Sometimes I’m not interested in the subject matter, or the writing isn’t for me, or I just don’t vibe with the story. This is not one of those books. This book is straight-up terrible, reading it is a bad time, and I do not recommend it to anyone. I will go to my grave wondering how on earth it got published by Tor.

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bethmalena's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.5

This book constantly challenged my expectations, especially around the theme of magic. I loved how queer it was, and that it honoured the different ways people heal from [religious] trauma. I felt uncomfortable with the level of detail around some of that trauma, particularly the sexual trauma - it felt like torture porn in places, and distracted from the overall message. Honestly I could have used more dialogue and less sex in general. But I think it’s still a book that will stick with me.

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alsoapples's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging emotional tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

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