Not a real review, just some bullet point reactions:

• Larke has managed a story which has strong and believable female (main) characters while working within a somewhat feudal world setting.
• The romance sub-text is kept firmly under the carpet, and not allowed to take over any of the storyline.
• Both the first person narrative, and the interspersed letters from the ethnographer worked, individually and in their interaction.
• Despite there being a fair number of characters, keeping the narrative to two viewpoints very much helped my ability to keep track, and increased my enjoyment. I suspect that there is also some very clever writing happening that is cueing which chacters is involved, rather that requiring detailed exposition (of which there is some, scattered through, but mostly for the filling in of backstory) every time someone appears on the scene. ( )

Trigger warning for sexual assault

The Aware is the first book in a second world fantasy series about Blaze Halfbreed. Blaze is searching for a mysterious Circasian woman on the spit, a lawless stretch of sand where the Isles of Glory send their unwanted. Along the way she encounters enough dunmagic, an evil form of magic that corrupts other magic users, to pose a threat to the entire Isles.

Blaze is one of the aware, people who can see and sense magic even if they cannot use it themselves. She is of mixed race, her parents coming from different islands. This heritage makes her despised and citizenless. She survives by working as a spy and assassin for the Keepers, the “good” magic users who have almost uncontested control over all the islands.

What I found most interesting about The Aware was the use of a framing device. The book starts with a letter written by a young anthropologist from a culture that seems sort of like Victorian England. He’s done some studies in the Islands of Glory which included interviewing Blaze as an old woman. The events in the book is what Blaze told him about her life. He is doubtful about her claims of magic and otherworldly creatures – in the present day, there is no magic in the islands. Unlike so many stories of magic returning to the world, it looks like this series will be about magic leaving it.

The Aware had some good world building ideas, but it fell flat in places. I loved the idea of a bunch of interacting islands, and I liked some of the creatures and magics Larke invented. However, I just never felt as intensely involved in the world as I would have liked. It lacked the vivid quality I find in the best built worlds.

Blaze is a fairly familiar character type – tough female mercenary, but she was well enough constructed even if she never exactly wowed me. I did like that she had an important female friend. However, I did feel that she became friends with everyone else a bit too quickly. She goes from being the friendless, hardened mercenary to making connections and caring about people within the span of a few days? It felt too sudden.

There was also something about Blaze and Flame, the female friend that bugged me. They are continually mistaken for lovers, and Blaze will then go on to assert her heterosexuality, except for once where she plays along and gives a speech about accepting gay people. However, there are no textual LGBTQ characters in the book. Something about all of this felt really off to me.

In reference to the trigger warning at the start of the review, the sexual assault that takes place within the main events of the story does not happen to Blaze and it is not explicitly shown. However, given that it does have a significant presence in the story and that Blaze herself has sexual assault in her backstory, I figured I’d err on the side of warning people in advance.

I did like The Aware, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to recommend it to anyone. In all likelihood, I won’t read the next one in the series.

Originally posted on The Illustrated Page. ( )

Great adventure fantasy. I loved the Isles world as a background, and Blaze is a wonderful unwilling heroine. I usually have problems with female main characters in fantasy, but I love Blaze. ( )

The first of a series and interesting but somehow lacking.

Blaze is a halfbreed and has little or no rights on the islands that make up the nation that she lives on. Blaze has an awareness of magic and can tell if it's magic on the side of good or evil. The main leaders of the islands are the Keepers who are using her for her skills, promising her eventual citizenship.

Her current mission is to find a missing woman. A royal woman, a woman who is supposed to bring more stability to an area with her marriage, however events get in the way of this mission and her life is threatened.

It's not a bad read and the framing device is interesting and I wouldn't mind reading more in the series, however it has some places where the story lags and becomes a bit ponderous. ( )

Now this is the sort of book I should like - fantasy, strong world creation, bit of magic, bit of sword play, strong female protagonist, not badly written. But I couldn't get into it and found myself skimming. Not sure why. Blaze Halfbreed wants citizenship and has to do what the Keepers want in order to get it. She's looking for a Cirkasian (caucasian?) slave and gets into all sorts of trouble on Gortham Spit. First of a trilogy. I'm not going to read the others, but feel a bit sad about it. I wanted to like this more. ( )