The Empire Wars

The Empire Wars #1

by Akana Phenix

The Empire Wars is an award-winning Hunger Games-inspired novel where survival and magic are a deadly mix.

Coa, who was born feral in the North Transatlantic wilds, has just been captured. Now, Coa is subject to public humiliation and execution in a gruesome spectacle known as The Great Hunt.

If participants die in the Great Hunt their entire family will be executed—in front of everyone. The nationalist regime, known as the Allied Force, will not rest until all foreigners are exterminated. Coa’s best hope of survival might be Princess Ife—born of privilege, but newly married into the authoritarian lineage.

Her riskier choice is an alliance with a gorgeous, cunning fellow participant, marked as a traitor to his militarized nation. Coa entangles herself with the captivating young man, but soon finds he could be her ultimate downfall…

Genres: Fantasy, Dystopia, Young Adult, Science Fiction, Audiobook, Fiction, Young Adult Fantasy

466 pages, Paperback

First published July 30, 2024

About the author

Akana Phenix is an award-winning Harvard alum, author, and screenwriter. She loves reading translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey in her spare time. She is a nostalgic 2000s kid, a film fanatic, and a fan of the Office. She’s based in the United States.

Reviews

[Cindy Pham]

happy book birthday to the empire wars!! 🎉🎉 excited to get my hands on this book and see how the story combines fantasy, sci-fi, and social commentary together. dare i say dystopia is BACK 👀

[Clace]

1.75!

I dont really have much to say on this because honestly I forgot most of the things about this book but know that I started this book on the 1st week of January but as an audiobook and although I was somewhat enjoying it, it quickly lost my interest and it dragged so much. With how amazing the premise was I was so hyped for it but it just didnt deliver.

The characters were just there but I honestly didnt really feel much for them and thats the same for the plot of the story, overall this book felt very distant like I could not connect to the story at all so it was just not for me :(
___
This sounded so interesting and the cover reminded me of Red Rising and I got an audio arc a while back so im excited to dive into this.

*Thank you to Netgalley and Blackstone publishing for the arc.*

[Reads With Rachel]

i wasnt expecting all that, goddamn

(transparency: i'm pals with the author and i'm in the acknowledgements of this book. this doesnt affect my review, but i value consumers having all the info they can in order to decide on their purchases)

[Mai H.]

Black History Month 2025 #2

Hot take: Maybe Cait Corrain knew what was up when she shat on all of these books

No plot. Characters coming out of nowhere. The acknowledgements say this was written in high school. I believe it.

Look. I love to shit on white people. Especially with other BIPOC women. But if you're going to culturally appropriate white people, do it correctly. The Dutch was wrong. The Russian was wrong. The Swedish was wrong.

How many ways can we describe green eyes (badly)?

🌵 doe-like green eyes
🌵 field-green eyes
🌵 ice-green eyes
🌵 pale-green eyes
🌵 sea-green eyes
🌵 slate-green eyes
🌵 storm-green eyes
🌵 verdant eyes

📱 Thank you to NetGalley and Blackstone Publishing

[cowy]

I saw this pitched as GET OUT meets HUNGER GAMES and we all need this book NOW

[Connie]

2.5 Stars
So much potential!

While I appreciate the intriguing concept, I found that the story didn't flow seamlessly and there was quite a bit of info dumping. Despite a strong start, I struggled to fully engage with the novel.

Overall, not for me.

***Thank you to NetGalley, Akana Phenix, and Blackstone Publishing for graciously sending me the audiobook to review. As always, all thoughts are my own.***

[Zana]

Feb. 7, 2025 edit: I think this might be the first time that one of my reviews has been shadow banned. I'm honored.

I'll start with a couple of my favorite out of context quotes from this novel that attempted to make some kind of poignant statement about toxic masculinity, but ended up being extremely nonsensical.

"He believes no desserts should be allowed past the age of ten for young men. It's not masculine."

"Men around Vørian don't dance or sing. Most have already destroyed a majority of their tear glands by the age of twelve. It's unfathomable to any of them to indulge in feminine activities."

Hunger Games fanfic meets Walmart Westworld meets Nazi death camps.

The author tried to tackle heavy, complex topics like fascism, white supremacy, genocide, etc., but it read like an overeager preteen who self-published their first book without any beta readers or editors. Somehow, this got picked up for a six-figure book deal. Who bought this and why???

It was so bad I can't even recommend it for a hate read. Stunning levels of cringe and secondhand embarrassment. I like to give some leeway to YA novels, but this was so so bad.

You've got:

❓ Random mashups of cultural names and ethnic groups like the author just skimmed random Wikipedia pages for inspiration
❓ Using letters not found in English like the author was just slamming random keys on their international keyboard (ø and ö make a lot of appearances, and I can't get over Maximus Størmbane lmaø)
❓ The ending was giving Face/Off (1997), which made it feel so comical when it should've been a very serious situation

Make it make sense!!!

Actually, don't. Life is too short for this shit.

[Chelsea]

ARC received from Netgalley.

I'm so, so sorry to say this--but the book is bad. Really bad. It needed a LOT more developmental editing, and I hope it got it before going to publication; I only got the ARC the day before publication and it took me a couple of days to get through it. I think the problems can be broadly broken into three main categories: the worldbuilding, Coa, and Ife.

The Worldbuilding
This world--which is, I should say, our world makes no sense. Phenix lays out a structure in which, for some reason, every country except the United States and the UK has become some other country entirely, and some random people from the Artic (but NOT indigenous people from the Arctic) called the Allied Forces (who are they allied with? literally no one, it just one big group) have taken over everything except the USA/UK alliance. How did we get to this point? METEORS. Yup. That's the whole explanation. Well, not really. Phenix does a LOT of info dumping in this book, for pages upon pages at a time, but none of it actually makes sense, and every time she tries to explain something, it just makes everything make less sense. Honestly, this book would have been much better suited to a second-world setting, because then she could have just scrapped all of the attempts at "how did we get here" and could have leaned much more on a "this is the way the world is" logic. There is also an attempt at having magic in this book, which isn't super well-done, and also with the exception of one in every eight million people, all magic belongs to indigenous African and Inuit communities (there is much more emphasis on the African magic than the Inuit magic, though the Inuit magic is mentioned in the background of one minor supporting character) which...seems to really lean into the whole "African mysticism" stereotype and seems problematic. (It is worth noting that Ife, our only main character with African origins, does NOT have magical abilities of her own.) A second-world setting could have alleviated some of the "what do you mean there's magic involved here" of the whole book as well. Phenix definitely could have had a second-world setting while still drawing on the horrors of various genocides in our world to make a point.

There's also the whole setup of the Great Hunt, where the Allied Forces send "foreigners" (aka anyone who is not them) into an area to be shot at by AF snipers over seven days, all while the foreigners do Hunger Games-esque things to each other to try to get ahead. Why? Who knows. In this particular iteration of the Great Hunt, the Hunt is taking place on an African island that is...cursed? Hexed? Alive with magic? Unclear. It is a SEVERELY UNDERUTILIZED setting. There is setup that the island can be bargained with after making an appropriate sacrifice; nothing ever comes of this. There is setup that a giant typhoon is going to come and wreak havoc on the place; nothing is ever done with this. The typhoon DOES come, but only in the sense that main character Coa says "Oh it was really bad and took a while to pass," with "a while" being less than 24 hours. The typhoon could have been utilized as really dramatic set-dressing for a final climactic encounter, but no.

Coa
Coa is one of the two main characters, and the one that is introduced first in the book. She is a prisoner in a forced labor camp run by the Allied Forces. She is one of the people being forced to compete in the Great Hunt, and she wants to survive the Great Hunt because if she dies as part of it, her entire family will be executed as well. She can also breathe fire and shoot lightning out of her hands even though she has no apparent connections of any of the communities that have magic in this book.

Coa's story makes no sense from the start. We NEVER find out how she ended up in this labor camp. Early on it seems like there is going to be a bit of a dual timeline for Coa, with the Great Hunt story taking up the "present" portion and a "how did we get here" timeline for the past, but that ends pretty quickly with Coa and her adoptive family deciding they want to run away from Hallowell, their native country, for the United States. We never see them actually enact this plan or find out how they got caught by the Allied Forces and end up in a labor camp off the coast of Africa (which part of Africa is never specified, just that it's tropical). Note that I said Coa's ADOPTIVE family. This is a big plot hole. I am a big proponent of found family stories, but it doesn't work here because Coa's ENTIRE STATED MOTIVATION for the entire book is that if she dies, her family will be killed. However, there is no indication of how the AF would ACTUALLY KNOW they are her family. She's literally asked if she has family early on by the AF, she says no, and they believe her. There is mention of DNA tracking being how they enforce family kill orders, but Coa's family is not biologically related to her, and so that won't work. So how does her being in the Great Hunt actually endanger them? Also, she says they'll all be killed if she dies but she literally starts off the book by telling a soldier to kill her, she doesn't care, which doesn't really set her up as a smart person to root for throughout the book. And then at the end, she's saying she's ready to die during the Great Hunt, apparently forgetting her entire stated motivation of protecting her family. She never, ever makes a single smart or strategic decision. Ever. Also, her magic (breathing fire and shooting lightning from her hands) supposedly comes at the cost of burning her lungs and throat, and will eventually kill her. I say "supposedly" because she uses her magic at various points in the book with none of these consequences. They don't show up until about 80% of the way through, when it heightens the drama in one specific encounter for them to show up. All the other instances, she walks away from her magic usage with no consequences of it at all.

Ife
Ife, at first blush, seems to hold more promise than Coa as a character. She is Makarian, which is one of the made-up countries in Africa and the only one that has magic. But Ife doesn't have magic. She is also a princess, and is married to Maximus Stormbane, who is the heir to the Allied Forces. How did Ife end up here? WE NEVER FIND OUT. She says her own family hates her for not having magic and TRIED TO KILL HER until she ran away TO THE ARCTIC (where, as a reminder, EVERYONE WOULD WANT TO KILL HER TOO FOR NOT BEING ARCTIC HERSELF), and then she apparently...lived in the wilderness for three years until she randomly turned up at a Makarian embassy and got married to Maximus? Absolute nonsense. Logic? Fleshed-out backstory? Never heard of it. Ife supposedly married Maximus because she intends to assassinate him and wanted the insider access being his wife would give her. Ife never, at any point in this entire book, makes any move to kill Maximus OR to prepare to kill him, in any way, which ultimately renders her entire character as kind of pointless. I kept waiting for her to DO something...but she never did.

Final Thoughts
Phenix states in the author's note section that she wrote her first draft of the book when she was a sophomore in high school...and honestly, I think that explains a lot. This very much reads like a book that was written by a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old. She tries to tackle topics like genocide that her writing just doesn't have the maturity to do well. Let's be honest; would most of us want the world to read something we wrote in high school? PROBABLY NOT, because it was more than likely REALLY BAD. This is not a knock against Phenix specifically, but just that teenagers are generally not amazing novelists because they haven't had the time to develop the skills that go into writing a really great novel. A really good developmental editor could have helped with this, with giving the book structure, cleaning up the worldbuilding, and solidifying character motivations and actions, but despite an editor being listed and thanked, it really does not feel like that high-touch development happened. I kept reading even though I wanted to DNF early on because I kept thinking that SURELY there was going to be some twist or reveal that was going to make everything click together, but that just never happened. I have no interest in reading further books in this series after how bad this one was, but hopefully by the time Phenix gets to her next story, whatever that may be, she will have the experience and maturity to draft a stronger story to start with, and the editorial support to make sure it truly shines. I wish her the best.

[Akana Phenix]

Hello, I am the author, Akana Phenix. Due to another author(s) secretly harassing my book and committing other racist actions, I had to restart here on Goodreads with a new book account and leave a message. If you see random accounts leaving racial slurs, or 1 star-review bombing, please report. My book is not out yet to the public, and Advance Reader Copies (ARCs) are unavailable, therefore those reviews are fakes.

THE EMPIRE WARS will be release 07/30/2024.
Thank you for your help.

Important Update: I don't check Goodreads. However, I respond to author emails and my apologies for the late response time! I expanded on this question in my Goodreads Author Q & A as well email. I will answer the question here for future readers to avoid confusion. Otherwise, please ask via Author Q & A. (I will try my best to be timely!)

The Allied Force is not a nation in Europe. For The Empire Wars, I re-imagined the North Pole, since no country owns the northernmost point of the Earth, and it is governed by international law. The Allied Force is located within the Arctic Circle, like the real Northern Hemisphere.

Thank you everyone for your support. Now, it is time for me to block the Goodreads page again for readers to enjoy. I love you! ❤️

[Increasingly Illiterate Iorek]

This book reads as though the manuscript was thrown into a blender and then stuck back together with tape, leaving a good quarter of it lost or as pulpy remnants in the bottom of the appliance. There is no good reason for why this book begins where it does except for cheap shock value and then chapter after chapter is spent trying to walk backwards and explain how we got here. It's a bad J.J. Abrams mystery box except half of the questions don't even get answered despite the innundation of info dumps.
The info dumps don't even really help because a lot of the info is contradictory. Like we're told that one character grew up in isolation but then we hear how others treated her and also that she watched movies, huh? Or that the Allied whatever force every person to go into the military, but then there are actresses? Huh? And it isn't that just men get conscripted, because it then says that the men like actresses because they aren't frigid like the ones in the army.
Things are made so unnecessarily complex and confusing, like I can't even tell you why the hell the weigh in was done. It's basically the part of Hunger Games where they give you a score and Katniss gets the 11 or whatever, but here we're told they strip naked, get weighed, and then ~somebody~ tells then how long they're gonna last based on ~reasons~. Now, why are they stripping naked this time when that normally isn't a thing? Why is Coa simultaneously fearful that her entire family gets murdered but also wanting the people to shoot her? Why is she talking about dying with dignity when it seems like there isn't even a choice? Why is it a shock that the one Slavic twin gets pulled into this again? What was thr alternative? I COULD NOT TELL YOU. Information just gets tossed about seemingly as the author thought it up and then they just never went back to edit this beast and so any hope or wish for good pacing and well explained world building is out the window.
It is all just simultaneously overwritten and underexplained that I frankly found it to be infuriating. We get page after page after page of info that doesn't really matter to the story here and is just telling us about the world at large, while basic things like, what the fuck is this Great Hunt or why are there tourists here when everyone in the Allied Forces is in the army or being actively beat up by thrle Allied Forces so who the hell are you people? It feels like the author read Hunger Games and was like, but what about the rest of the world? Where is Estonia in all of this?? So they went and wrote that, not realizing that is doesn't fucking matter to Katniss what the hell is happening in Estonia when she's starving to death!
That brings me to my other main issue which is the fact that Coa somehow thinks like a 20 something with a liberal arts degree when she spent her entire life barely scraping by. How does she know so much about history and political structures when Miss Ma'am was working 23 hours a day? And why the hell does she care about the princess? She's all ready to get herself shanked to help princess princess when, I'm sorry, but if I was a starving peasant, I'd be a tad more concerned with the "not starving" part of my daily routine and less concerned with the "foreign princess I don't even know is being a huge idiot right now". Different political structures are also propped up as being ideal, immaculate edifices just... no. Democracies can be sources of discrimination and intolerance too, y'know? I mean *looks out the window circa September 2024 in America* *sees everything on fire* democracy has plenty of it's own issues. It feels a bit childish to be waxing poetically about how amazing democracy is, and also, WHY DOES COA KNOW THIS??? GIRL IS EATING DIRT FOR DINNER! HOW DOES SHE KNOW WHAT DEMOCRACY IS???
The abusive conditions which non-Allied Forces people are put under is also just... ridiculous. It feels cartoonish and over the top. Now I think that there's a fine line that authors have to walk and decide if their representation of real world issues is going to undersell it or oversell it. For example, The Handmaid's Tale is an extreme that would probably, hopefully, *cough* Project 2025 *cough* never come to fruition. But the genius in that is that some times things in The Handmaid's Tale will come eerily close to real life and things we see today. So we see this far flung impossible world, but then they start talking about banning birth control and how cat ladies are the Bane of society, and we're struck by how close this seemingly impossible world comes to our own. We see how our own society can be extreme or unreal. On the other hand, some stories are best told as underexaggerations of what has happened. For example, The Grapes of Wrath (wow look at me, so pretentious) isn't doom and gloom all the time, there are moments of joy. Additionally, Steinbeck visited tenet farmer camps to write a more accurate portrayal of their lives, giving to story a more grounded feeling. You read The Grapes of Wrath and feel that these are real people with varied lives and experiences and you feel sympathy for them and what they're going through. If the book was all bad all the time and the stuff that was happening to them was over the top ridiculous, then it'd be easy to dismiss as fiction and go on your day because there's no way that could be true.
The Empire Wars tries to straddle both of these likes, being overexaggerated in it's portrayal of an oppressive regime, while also trying to talk about real world genocides. But when you read about people cleaning floors with tooth brushes and getting 2 hours of sleep, it feels satirical. It also feels like the Allied Forces have literally nothing better to do than fuck with these people. I mean, that isn't impossible, I know what Famine Walls are, but it seems like a waste of resources to have your vast supply of cheap labor cleaning floors with toothbrushes. Like y'all don't need people to build weapons or sew uniforms for your infinite army? No? Don't need caregivers for the children of your 100% conscription rate population? Don't need food prep? Nothing? Seriously? It just feels like the author is throwing in every ridiculous and impractical thing they can imagine and thus undermine the part of the book where its meant to being attention to historical genocides and cruelties. If I can't take your dystopia government seriously, then how can you expect for me to learn about others with a level of maturity and openness?
There's also the part where the games make no sense because what point is there to them? Like I get the hunting humans for sport - that's what I do every Thursday night - but why the murdering their entire families and stringing them up on twine part? You guys are going to be running out of families at this rate. And what message is this meant to impart? Don't have families because then your shitty child will get you all killed? How do your labor camps keep operating if you kill everyone and nobody has children? Are they just hoping to kill the whole world and then expect their sergeants to start picking up cleaning bathrooms with toothbrushes? This feels like a snake eating it's own tail situation.
Overall, this book needed to be savagely shredded up, the pieces rearranged to give us a modicum of sense instead of this timelike jumping around BS, the unimportant info dumps discarded, and just the important meat of the issue focused on. I just think the author worked on this book for too long and added too much that it went past the breaking point and reaching the situation where you feel like you've been cornered by someone at a party explaining their hyper fixation on rabbits to you for 3 hours (it's me, I'm the weirdo with the rabbit hyper fixation). And while I appreciate the author's intentions, the flawed execution leaves much to be desired and does little to convincingly address their topic.

[Osi]

This was...something. I really tried to get into it. I really really tried. Too much info dump, characters all over the place with their motivations and traits. Reminded me of Handbook for Mortals in the execution.

I thought this book was about or had POC characters, but almost every main character has white skin, blue/green eyes, and/or blond hair. What's up with that? Maybe I missed something.

Also, the alternate benevolent government shown to have existed before the genocidal maniacs took over was headed by people with wealth and status watching over the poors. Apparently, they really knew how to run countries fairly. Bro. The infantilization of poor and disadvantaged people happening in this book is very icky, and that was what ultimately made me not like this book enough to write a review here.

Not telling you not to read but beware. I see some people liked it and even loved it. Good for them, maybe you will like/love it too. I'm an equal opportunity reader, and this time, this book was not for me. Maybe it will be it for you. Merry good reads.

[Mariana ✨]

THIS SYNOPSIS?????? IT SOUNDS SO GOOD LET'S GOOOOOOOOOO

"Are you worth killing for?
Are you worth dying for?

A feral girl named Coa has lived her entire life raised by the wild and knowing no other existence. But when her family is captured by a brutal military regime, Coa is thrust into a deadly game of survival and strategy known as the Great Hunt.
Coa must rely on her instincts and primal skills to survive—only winners free their captive families.
But in this militarist nation, infamous for widespread genocide, if that family member dies in the Hunt—their entire family will be executed next.
Coa only has one chance.

Dive into the thrilling world of THE EMPIRE WARS where HUNGER GAMES meets GET OUT in this breathless, heart-pounding debut."

[Courtney]

I'm honestly astounded this made it through editing. I know it's a YA, but good grief was this written by a 12 year old? Needlessly convoluted, unclear, with bizarre character behavior and motivations. Nobody acts or speaks like a real human being. There's so much exposition crammed inside of conversations that what little flow there might be is stunted by a paragraph and a half of information that contradicts information from a previous expositional paragraph.

Normally I can find something to like. This is just... irredeemable.

[Jenn]

Hold on to something because there is a LOT going on in The Empire Wars, but it absolutely works! So strap in! Coa has just been captured and is going to be subjected to a violent game (?) called The Great Hunt where people are massacred for the entertainment of the ruling class. But if you survive, your family is safe...until the next one. Meanwhile, Princess Ife, from a conquered African nation, is married to the chief sniper, and is determined to take down the empire from the inside. But can Ife or Coa survive long enough to reach their goals? This brutal YA future dystopian story is chock full of action and violence, all wrapped around an extremely compelling narrative that doesn't sound quite so far fetched.

There's a lot of telling instead of showing in this books and usually I don't like that. But there's so much going on and backstory here that it's necessary. Not only that, but it's interesting. Is there a sequel to this? If there is, I'm in!

[Emilie]

Can’t wait to read this! Adding stars early to help the author rebuild her account after all of the racist bullshit recently.

[adaptation brain]

hello. i wrote a negative review of this book many months ago, and for some reason, right after the book was published, the review was shadowbanned. it remains viewable through a direct link, and a revised and expanded version of it is available on my blog. links to both below. in the mean time, i am posting a slightly shorter variant of my review so any potential readers have access to this book's true breadth of reception. let's see how this goes.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

https://adaptationbrain.wordpress.com...

///

coa wildflower rangecroft has been drafted into a spectacle killing called the great hunt. she and her adopted siblings were captured from hallowell, a post-usa territory in north america comprising of marshland areas such as louisiana, mississippi etc (excluding florida, which still exists as its own recognized, autonomous region somehow). they are subsequently enslaved as laborers by the allied force of the arctic empire. they live in concentration camps (term used by the book) and are effectively livestock. if coa is one of the 74 losers of the great hunt, her siblings will all be murdered. if she wins, they will be safe until the next hunt. (when is the next hunt? i don’t know).

chief princess ife of the makari-african empire is 16 pretending to be 18. when she was 13 she ran away from home, determined to infiltrate the arctic empire. and boy has she! her husband is maximus størmbane, the son of the head general sovereign ruler of the allied force military. she plays a ditzy, stupid and frivolous exotic wife around him (and all people of the arctic empire) so she’s underestimated. ife spends the book trying to gather information about the allied force so she can do something with it (what? nothing specific). she also plans to use her proximity to the head general, maximus etc to kill them someday. not today tho.

the other primary male character is hazen creed. despite being a citizen of the allied force, (he was even engaged to marry ife at SOME POINT) he is a fellow participator in the great hunt who decides to team up with coa. why would he choose to help some random feral girl? won’t they have to kill each other eventually? shouldn’t she be wary of this guy with an elite soldier’s training eventually betraying her? might a tense attraction develop between them? don’t worry about it!

the two of them also pick up a stray allied force blueblood richkid named bray who exists to be sympathetic, develop class consciousness, and reawaken tendrils of humanity in coa and hazen. initially, he believes that the whole process of the great hunt is just an extremely realistic film set. also he has an underdeveloped parasocial crush on ife. bray (and others with enough money) are allowed to be on the island where the allied force snipers are hunting, trapping, and killing the participants. why does the arctic empire allow random civilians to basically pay to participate in the hunt? isn’t there a risk a powerful wealthy citizen will be killed as collateral and cause a lot of problems for the government? do the survivors still think it’s all fake once the hunt ends? i don’t know.

it is unconventional for a book to marry fantasy and dystopic sci-fi elements, but alas the empire wars does. the arctic empire has insanely advanced technology such as turning nuclear warheads into oxygen, invisible impenetrable body armor, mind consciousness experiments, etc. HOWEVER! there are five types of elemental-ish magic users: rainborn, fireborn, huntborn, darkborn, sunborn. only one in 800 million people born outside of a single family from a specific village in makari-africa has magical powers. coa has fireborn lightning powers. coa is white. these are three seemingly incompatible statements that nonetheless are all true. don’t worry about it!

i bring this up because both of these genres tend to have different mechanics in terms of their respective utility regarding social commentary. generally speaking, sci-fi is forward looking (where we place our fears of the future), fantasy is backward looking (where we place our shames of the past); the creep of technology supplanting our sense of humanity and self vs the consequences of the inequities in old hierarchical structures of power (i am speaking Very Broadly). it’s possible to meld them together successfully, but when it’s this haphazard, everything is rendered basically meaningless. magic is effectively neutered throughout the world, it has imposed limitations on users that never factor into the story, it does not interact with technology in any way, the spirituality often associated with magic is never explored. these elements don’t feel like they should inhabit the same world. it’s poorly thought out.

there’s also no enforced sense of time to orient the reader in this dystopian landscape. a century of asteroid impacts decimated the human population, the arctic people nearly went extinct. BUT to my understanding, 33 years ago, the largest asteroid event happened which enabled the arctic empire to consolidate their power and fully subjugate the rest of the world. below is the quote from the book. i will refrain as much as i can from quoting the book as i know it has yet to be published, but sometimes you just have to read it to believe it. this is (to my memory) the only time in the book these redefining global events are detailed.

the nebulous time placement isn’t a huge problem for dystopias when current geographic terms are changed. no present day countries or regions are named in the hunger games, 1984 divides the world into three super-regions, oceania, eurasia and eastasia, which (in my opinion) evoke to a contemporary reader similar regions with similar people.

these techniques imply a far future time, the unfamiliar or anachronistic accentuating how much the world has changed. but when places like britain and florida are referenced as extant, when countries and their respective nationalities like germany, switzerland, norway, et al are named in exposition dumps by a lead character it raises so many questions. it’s disorienting. it takes you out of the story. it’s bad worldbuilding. wdym nukes can be turned into oxygen but britain still exists!!! will we never be free of them!!!!

not to belabor the physics-defying nuclear to oxygen technology, but that the rest of the world’s technology (the transatlantic empire of america and britain specifically) is a hundred years behind the allied force’s is absolutely insane. america invented the arms race. nobody on earth spends more on military technology than the united states. why is this, how???? don’t worry about it.

ok let’s get to germany, switzerland and norway. the allied force believes in arctic genetic supremacy, considering all people who don’t have 100% pure arctic blood to be “foreign” and therefore inferior, enslaveable, disposable. this includes those from germany, switzerland, norway, wider scandinavia and britain of course. all those from the makari-african empire are foreign, from america and hallowell, the russo-inspired vraničar empire, what used to be asia. all foreign.

so that begs the question, what does it mean (in terms that we the readers can understand) to be purely arctic? perhaps it means indigenous sámi or the inuit? specific slavic ethnic groups? maybe romani for some reason? no! in fact all four of these groups are specifically genocided by the allied force. i do not know what it means to be genetically arctic, and it seems that most people who still exist are not genetically arctic.

some more world-context. a vast percentage of the human population was killed by a century of asteroid strikes. most of the surviving people are considered non-arctic. the arctic empire has upward of 350 million people. the allied force still has not completed their quest of total world domination and eradication of every “foreigner”. how. if so many people are in the out-group, if populations have been so drastically changed, how is it logistically possible for a nation presumably around the arctic circle to have so thoroughly subjugated the rest of the world. once everyone else is dead, who’s going to do the hard labor?? don’t worry about it.

nazi ideology and fascism never… got that far. and i refer to the nazis because of the obvious aesthetic and ideological similarities they share with the allied force. they share the same maxim: “blood and soil”, but the empire wars adds “birthright” onto the end. however. hitler never conquered europe. and maybe i’m just saying things, but i don’t think it would have been sustainable even if he did, especially with the narrow parameters of who is considered “aryan”.
to survive abolition, industrialization, and immigration, white supremacy in the united states had to evolve to absorb nationalities and ethnicities beyond the anglo-saxon, germanic, protestant christian elites. in so many modern discussions of race in america, bad faith actors often invoke the discrimination experienced by the irish, italian, jewish eastern european, etc to minimize the systemic oppression of people of color.

i’m certain there are individual cases of an ethnically ambiguous white person being harassed for looking nonwhite, and i know that some people of color would effectively pass as white for short or long periods of time. but generally and functionally, different white ethnic groups were always white, in the sense that they would attend whites-only schools in the south, could join segregated labor unions, could legally marry an anglo-saxon or germanic person in most states (though i will admit to needing to research this generalization more).
anyway. white supremacist ideology cannot exist without destroying the solidarity of various diverse racial and ethnic underclasses through the assimilation of some and bestowment of socioeconomic rewards upon them. it cannot remain so exclusive, it will fail.

we all know that race and whiteness are social constructs. we know that race, ethnicity and nationality are different things. we all know about the insidiousness of colorism, even featurism amongst all communities, predominantly white or otherwise. we know that relative proximity to whiteness is conflated with class, morality, value and is therefore prized above all else.

but for this book, which is about genocide predicated on nationality and genetics, to never define in any meaningful way what it means to be “arctic” is frustrating. there are vital sociological and anthropological elements that are necessary to understanding international and interpersonal relationships in the world phenix constructed, and she is simply not equipped to write it. there is, TO ME, no way to fully intake how this society works.

in some ways, the allied force is a stereotype of fascism. its leaders have committed more genocide than any other people in human history (paraphrased directly from the book). it has an army of 350 million people (ish). yet they do not covet the magic of the makari-africans, they simply kill them indiscriminately. they do not expand into non arctic territory despite seemingly cleansing it of its former inhabitants. the arctic empire’s methods cannot be detailed because doing so would expose inconstancies in the very ideological foundation of the narrative.

totalitarianism is antithetical to what i believe is the human spirit. duh. it has been attempted in life and will be depicted in fiction. but why write it so incoherently. curiously enough the book never uses the terms fascism or fascist. chew on that! for what it’s worth, it’s curious as well to me that western europe still exists in societal memory in phenix’s world, but all other places are reduced to vaguely ethnic make ‘em ups. ah yes, the weird centering of whiteness!

the tone and voice of the text places weird reverence on very traditional, rugged, stoic, masculinity. hazen creed and maximus størmbane, prince of genocide are both blond, six-foot-something, gigachad warrior men. this attempts to be commentary. some might know of the alt-right, neo-nazi, western culture warriors’ common invocation of and fixation on norse and nordic aesthetics. it’s a prelapsarian desire to return to the times before woke, glorifying violence and the culture of what they see as their racially pure ancestors. notice how this does not comport with the previously mentioned germany, switzerland, norway thing. whoops!

i cannot emphasize enough how white-centered the gaze, narration, and construction of this book is. coa is blonde, she and hazen creed are both green eyed. maximus, prince genocide is blue eyed. ife has green eyes and long silk pressed pink hair. ife’s brother zaire’s eyes are green. her indigenous bodyguard pacer is blond and blue eyed to the point where he can pass for arctic. bray’s eyes are a light whiskey brown, so are the eyes of an allied force sergeant. ife’s vaguely east asian hairstylist kateri’s eyes are mud brown. and im not even joking.

now’s as good a place as any to discuss the book’s random attempts at depicting queerness that are SO dated it’s almost crazy. zaire is ambiguously lgbt in a way that neither informs his character, grants him interiority or affects how he moves through the world. there’s a passing reference to kateri teaching ife how to kiss like it’s cruel intentions (1999) with no elaboration. and that’s all on the gay front folks. shit is lazy, dumb and WEIRD.

all of these characters lack basic interiority, which means that what’s on the page is all we can work with. coa (and to a lesser extent hazen and bray, all white) are the voices of resistance and power. they are allowed to take action while ife can only fret and ruminate until the book’s insane ending. despite the synopsis, she and coa do not interact at all beyond the first three chapters of the book.

back to maximus, prince of genocide. he’s described as accommodating, attentive, attractive. ife thinks he killed her beloved grandfather as he was begging for mercy. he does not eat meat around ife because she’s a vegetarian. he has killed untold numbers of people. he has been raising his youngest brother outside of their culture’s hyper-militaristic standards of masculinity. he whips a vraničarian dissident until he’s a dead heap of raw flesh not because he spoke against the empire, but because he insulted ife. as much as she says maximus only loves the idea of her, she recognizes his expressions of love are genuine. there is no nonwhite male character who is afforded this amount of interiority, not that there are many who even appear in the book.

perhaps this book wasn’t meant to be thought of in depth such as this. akana phenix could certainly claim that. but when you’re dealing with such topics as genocide, ethnic cleansing, the ritual murder and extinction of people, it begs introspection and a close read. especially when the book randomly name drops different historical atrocities in only the most superficial of ways, like they’re cheap cameos or easter eggs to spot. that phenix, who obviously cares about the injustice and horrors of genocide, invokes history in so casual a way is irreconcilable to me. the book has so little to say about the important topics it depicts. there is no insight, no thought, no meaningful commentary attached. perhaps she thinks the book is meaningful commentary in it of itself. tragic if true.

any story momentum during the great hunt dies again in a scene attempting character work, when coa is reflecting upon her own upbringing with hazen creed. she and her five siblings were raised by a man named whitelaw. he turned the children into a traveling sideshow attraction, letting suburbia gawk at how wild and feral they are, having coa show off of her lightning magic. he taught them to read, cared for them when they were sick, never physically abused them. contrasted with their next guardian caner, who beats these children regularly. it’s why the children call him caner. coa also momentarily thinks he murdered whitelaw. he acclimates them into structured society with horrible violence.

hazen doesn’t understand her affection for whitelaw, then starts reciting from the dsm5 about exploitation in relationships. coa resists, then chapters later, (thanks to the magic of the hunting island and hazen’s memories of his family don’t worry about it) she accepts his explanation of her own life. phenix writes this change in coa’s thinking into four paragraphs. there is no further exploration of her feelings, no description on page of how these magic mind sharing memories make her feel, a switch simply flips. she should have killed whitelaw! the island is magic! moving on!

phenix has a bad habit in her prose with ending a sentence then making the secondary clause that completes the idea into a separate sentence. examples below.


“Before, I couldn’t fathom why the Allied Force committed any of this when it also experienced total devastation. Near extinction.”


“An axe slices over my ear. Nearly cutting my skin.”


“My body insists on shutting down. Frustrating me.”
– Akana Phenix, pgs. 180, 216, 397

it’s meant to impart seriousness or punctuate a feeling but it reads as halting and juvenile. it’s a technique she repeats constantly to the point where i always noticed it. also, this book is 440 pages long. the words eye, eyes, eyebrow, eyelash and eyelid appear 421 times total. it feels like everyone involved in publishing this thing just gave up. which is what i’m doing now!

why even write this book. what does this novel say that hasn’t been said before, or better, or more concisely. if this is the best version of this book, it is a terrible reflection on all in editorial who worked on it. i cannot recommend it under any circumstance.

[The Page Ladies Book Club]

I received this book yesterday it has 464 pages I started reading at 1127pm and it's now 1136am and I have finished it! Wow! Just wow! Lol! There is a lot going on in this world! There's a lot going on! There's a lot of history about the world and each character but it is so entertaining and you can't help but want to know more and then you have the current events and you absolutely want to know what will happen next! I can't wait for the next book and to find out what will happen next! Thank you Bibliolifestyle, Akana Phenix and William Morrow Books for sharing this wonderful story with me!

[Pine Reads Review]

“Zero time remaining. You may begin hunting.”

The Empire Wars, the first book in Akina Phenix’s breakout series, follows two girls as they attempt to survive the Allied Force, a nationalist government well into their mission of taking over the world. Coa Rangecroft grew up wild, learning to survive with little and less before she and her family were captured and placed in a labor camp run by the military. Ife Størmbane, former princess of the now decimated Makarian civilization, has married the infamous Sniper General. Tensions rise as the annual Great Hunt looms, a gruesome show in which foreigners are forced to fight for their lives amongst seventy five others, all while being hunted down by the Empire’s most prized snipers. The punishment for dying is the execution of one’s entire family. While Coa attempts to survive against desperate participants on a hostile island, Ife must masquerade as a patriotic citizen amongst people who hate her very existence.

Akana Phenix has created a world that delves into genocides, focusing on the fortitude of individual victims that are caught in the crossfire of a hostile government that only cares for power. The dual perspectives of Coa and Ife allow for insight into greatly different sides of the macabre actions of the Allied Force, against both their own people and foreigners. Coa and Ife fight for the people they care about yet the circumstances of their lives are totally estranged, not only in their pasts but also in their current situations. Coa fights to live another day, while Ife’s attentions are focused on avenging her family. Both are horrified by the Great Hunt and the atrocities involved but on different sides of the chaos and with different roles in society. I found myself fascinated by the portrayal of these characters, their contrasting roles—one has magic but lacks a position of power, while the other has the right position but no magic of her own. The presence of magic was not something I was expecting, but I was delighted to read how Phenix incorporated this magic system into a story with high dystopian elements and characters desperate to survive. Akana Phenix has designed a complex world with tantalizing twists that build in intensity and don’t stop until the very last word.

Pine Reads Review would like to thank NetGalley and Blackstone Publishing for sending us an ARC in exchange for an honest review. Any quotes are taken from an advanced copy and may be subject to change before final publication.

Follow us on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and Facebook @pinereadsreview, and check out our website at www.pinereadsreview.com for reviews, author interviews, blogs, podcast episodes, and more!

[Linda Steiner]

So excited to see this author's take!! I will definitely put this on my daughter's TBR list. Please keep going.

[Hayley Daniels]

I really wanted to like this. It's really just ... not good.

[Rayna Moreschini]

The Empire Wars represent a brutal debut into dystopian fiction. Set against the back drop of a futuristic Earth, largely conquered by the Allied Forces of the Arctic, the story follows two women from different marginalized backgrounds, using every tool they have to survive and protect the people and nations they love.

Phenix contrasts the chillingly callous military progress of the Allies with the visceral hereditary magic of the Makari peoples in a way that highlights the horrors of colonialism and dehumanization. She weaves a sense of dread and anticipation through each chapter and quietly foreshadows that, as bad as things are now, they're about to get so much worse.

I can't wait for the next book.

[Amanda Curry]

I legitimately sat and stared into space for a good hour after I finished this. It has so many twists and turns and turns it blew my mind.

It explores genocide openly and rawly but digestible to an audience who may not find it a comfortable topic.

I loved it so much, it brought me back to when I first read hunger games.

Thank you so much to NetGalley and Blackstone publishing for the eARC.

[akacya ❦]

2024 reads: 234/250

disclaimer: i received a finished copy of the book from the publisher as part of a book tour hosted by bibliolifestyle. this did not affect my review/rating.

content warnings: genocide, racism, war

coa has been captured and subjected to public humiliation and potential execution as part of the great hunt, a gruesome spectacle held by the nationalist regime known as the allied force. if she doesn’t survive, neither will her family, so she has to find allies quickly.

while i haven’t seen this being compared to the hunger games, i do think this is one of the few books that deserve a comparison to it. a lot of hunger games comparisons have a deadly competition without the social commentary, but this had both. we get the perspectives of coa, a forced participant in the hunt, and princess ife, who comes from a conquered nation and is hoping to take the empire down from the inside following her marriage to a man who ranks high in the allied force. seeing these two different, yet similar, points of view helped put the whole story into perspective.

i highly recommend this book, and i can’t wait for the sequel!

[Ashleigh Geissert]

I got this book off of NetGalley, so thank you for letting me be an ARC reader for this one.

Overall rating: ⭐️⭐️
Plot:⭐️⭐️⭐️
Characters: ⭐️⭐️
Spice: 🌶️

I think this book had a lot of potential. It was an interesting idea with cool technology and magic and culture, but not enough relevant details were supplied and the details that were never related the three, so as the reader I was just so confused.

The main story follows the perspectives of Coa and Ife, one a foreign teenager that resides in the labor camps of the Allied Force and was selected to participate in the Great Hunt, and the other a foreign princess who married the all-admired Maximus Størmbane as a way to infiltrate the Arctic and bring their society down in revenge.

The author obviously has a vivid imagination, and certain scenes can be seen because of the detail. The problem is that there are quite a few inconsistencies and things that just don’t make sense. Two examples would be Coa says that she was nonverbal, raised feral until they were taken in by Whitelaw, but later she says that their older sister taught them words. Also, at the beginning of the book it mentions that Coa has a crippled foot but that she trained and now can run long distances like it doesn’t bother her. Multiple times her crippled foot is brought up but it never slows her down or seems to cause her pain or does anything for the story in general; just an unnecessary and confusing detail. Another thing is that Coa was raised in the south, and as if to prove that she will say “ain’t” at random times but not anything else that would point even remotely towards a southern heritage.

The world building again had a lot of potential; the author had a lot she wanted to say! I just felt like there was too much and it wasn’t connected in a clean way, so I was left guessing about things or rereading to see if I had missed some vital piece of information.

Some of the characters are ok, Ife was the only one I thought was pretty developed, though for all her talk about being smart she was painfully naive and unhelpful. She was a mostly good character though.

Coa seemed inconsistent, seeming at times to want to survive so she could save her family and then at other times thoughtlessly endangering herself and by extension her family.
Hazen was ok but again, it didn’t feel like he was totally developed. He was cocky and charming and then totally unfeeling and irritable. A traitor but also (SPOILER) working with the same people that put him in the hunt?
Bray was naive and unhelpful and soft and is likable but just makes some weird choices.

Also the Allied Force citizens all seem to think that the Great Hunt is some fake televised reality show where everything is staged, but some of them participate(???) and they are literally touring labor camps and see public executions, which didn’t add up.

I think the ingredients for a really cool story are all here, they maybe just need to be mixed up with a little more thought and the maybe spent a little longer in the oven (sorry for the cooking metaphor!).

I think this author has a lot of potential, and I think if the second book could provide clearer info with less plot holes and more connection between the elements of the story, I would read it!

[Alaina]

I have received this ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This was a lot for a book that I sort of went into blindly.

Though, to be fair, it has been collecting dust on my wonderful TBR since 2024... but details. I saw "Hunger Game" vibes and just clicked with zero hesitation. After meeting Cao, well, it was very easy to start hoping for things to just get better for her. My goodness, she dealt with so much shit in this book that even my back was hurting from all the weight.

It's just filled with so much torture and sadness. I mean at one point, I was totally on board with joining the rebellion and destroying everything in this world. Maybe even smile and evil laugh while everything goes to shit and burns. Was I confused with some decisions that happened throughout this book? Yes, obviously but I didn't think about pressing that pause button once. I wanted to see all the chaos play out.

That being said I'm still confused on some stuff and hope that the next book clears it all up. Or destroys everything - I'm okay with either option. There were also a few good twists throughout this and, man, that last one? Ha -- so good! Will definitely need to see how that will play out for sure.

[Vena Lore]

Really punches you in the face in a gritty, grounded way.

The Empire Wars honestly shouldn't be the name of this book as obviously what we're building towards is the aforementioned Empire War. But that's just a nitpick, the book is incredible. I have a lot to say both negative and positive,

First I won't lie, the first half if kinda a slog to get through, I actually ended up skipping the 3 chapters dedicated to Coa's backstory; I knew for a fact of life she and Hayzen Creed(I read the audio book, so forgive me if this isn't the correct spelling of his name) would have a conversation talking about their tragic backstories. And they did. Akana Phenix obviously really cares about Coa and thinks the details of her backstory are important; I don't disagree as I love a good feral child backstory. But it interrupts the flow and isn't nearly interesting enough to justify using 3 chapters to get through. After the first 50% this book kicks into overdrive and it becomes fantastic pacing wise.

Another thing is I think there needs to be a tighter understanding of the Great Hunt early on, because there's no mention of immunity or what happens to the winners until way later. There's one handed comment from Coa saying she still be forced to work for the Allied force but she would be able to leave with her family??? and yet Hayzen can only use his immunity on himself and not his family??? And in some of the promo it claims there can only be one winner but there's no mention of that in text, and no one seems to acts like that's the case other than Coa thinking she'll kill Hayzen if she has to. But it just seems like a week of the Deadliest Game(tm).

Ife's story is my favorite parts, from the voice they chose for the audio book, to her downfall arc. Believing she is mature, and politically savvy- sabotaging the Allied force from the inside. To seeing her fail and come to terms with how little she's actually done and how little she really knows- she is just a teenage girl afterall. Some insanely cool stuff happens in her POVs, a cool use of sci-fi tech and medicine and I won't spoil it but I was SHOUTING in my kitchen while cooking. It's so rad you will not regret it for the twists and turns of Ife's povs alone.

I have really so much to say I feel like I need to make a video essay or something before I write a novel about this novel. I haven't even touched on the politics, that feel real and scary in this day and age. A lot of it is incredibly on the nose and it isn't lost on me the German/Russian inspired Fascists are called the Allied Force. A real kick in the pants to the real life Allied Force as they continuously turn a blind eye to, or worse, enact genocide, ethnic cleansing, and destabilizing foreign nations for their own benefit. There's also illusions to the 'one drop' rule, as Coa is mixed and she remarks how despite being white passing and fits in the beauty standards with blond hair and green eyes, she will never be "white" to these people. And a lot of talk about masculinity in a violent culture that I thought was insanely compelling and was a selling point to me originally.

I highly recommend this, just. Just read it. It has it's flaws, yes, but it is worth the read anyways.

[Michele The Stick]

The Empire Wars is a dismal book. It exists in a world filled with so much abject horror that I am not sure it is worth saving. The Author failed to give the reader a singular moment of joy. Even in the flashbacks of childhood, of which there were many, it was all horrible. Every character in the novel is essentially tortured their whole life except one, who is presented as weak and unlikable, primarily due to the fact that he had a happy childhood. We didn't get to see any of his happy childhood, just the mockery of it.

There was a Science Fiction Element mixed in with the magic that was interesting. The technology and the magic were not fully explained and in some cases difficult to accept. I believe tear ducts are necessary for more than just showing emotions, but what do I know, maybe in this world of terror they are not.

The narration was fantastic. January LaVoy an Jesse Villinsky did an excellent job of ushering me through this book. At first I thought that Koa was a little too dramatic, but I honestly think that was the writing and not the delivery.

Look there is a lot that is good here, the world is interesting if not gruesome. The descriptions and character development were beautiful and complex. There are a few interesting twists. But I didn't have any fun with The Empire Wars and I didn't learn anything new. I was already aware that war is terrible, that people suck, and that violence leads to more violence.

[Sara]

WOW!!! Those last three chapters??? 🤯 Review to come! ⚔️

(FINAL REVIEW:)

Holy moly how do I start this review? First of all, I’ll just describe it as if The Hunger Games were on steroids and if Katniss was totally down for war crimes like in The Poppy War. This book is not for the faint of heart and readers should really heed the Author’s Note at the beginning of the book. Okay, on to the review! 🫡

The story is set in a distant future where the world is taken over by the Allied Force who subjects all conquered countries to forced labor and genocide. I was slightly confused as to who the Allied Force are other than Arctic people (but not the indigenous people), but when you accept that they’re just a cold group of people hell bent on showing people how superior they are, it gets easier. ❄️

The two main POVs are Coa, a young woman surviving in a forced labor camp, and Ife, another young woman who is married to the second highest person in command. Coa reminds me of Katniss in a way that she is trying to survive in a world that’s set out to see her lose. She’s cautious and doesn’t trust anyone easily, but at times I thought she was a bit too naive for someone in her situation. I really enjoyed Ife’s character since it reminds me of Rin and how she tries to survive in an incredibly toxic environment. I can’t say more on her since it would be a spoiler, but I did find myself looking forward to her POV most often. 🦴

There’s more I wish I could say, but I’d be spoiling the whole book at that point. It’s brutal and really demonstrates how humanity can literally be its own worse enemy and repeat history. I do think it would’ve done a bit better as an adult series instead of pitched as older YA/NA, but that’s also because I’m still thinking unhinged teens is a bit of a stretch. But those last three chapters . . . 🤯

Big thank you goes out to Blackstone Publishing and NetGalley for accepting my request to read this in exchange for an honest review. And a shout out goes to the author, Phenix, for creating a KILLER (literal and figurative) debut! ❤️

Publication date: August 6!

Overall: 4.25/5 ⭐️

[Sasa]

jesse vilinsky and january lavoy went above and beyond narrating this book. however not even the best acting can turn poor writing into gold. the narrative is bogged down by repetition, useless descriptions, info dumping, out of place jargon (like "rich people problems"), milquetoast characters, and juvenile nonsense. a lot of the worldbuilding details don't track and the amount of redundant info dumps were staggering. also how am i supposed to relate to a story that's supposedly meant for bipoc and be a commentary on war and genocide when most of the characters are white and the mc is "blond, green-eyed" and white/white passing?? it wouldn't have been an issue if there was meaningful commentary illustrating the violent history of white imperialism but it just didn't work. i found out this was written in high school and that makes a lot of sense. the writing style is not for me.

----

cover designer: james t. egan

[Bethany J]

*Thank you to the publisher via Netgalley for an e-arc in exchange for an honest review*

Oof, I'm sorry but this was kind of a mess. I think the writing is decent for a debut novel, but the structure and plotting of this book didn't work for me at all.

This story follows two POVs (written in 1st-person): Coa and Ife. Other than a few stylistic choices, there wasn't much to differentiate their POVs in terms of narrative voice. Then, there's the fact that I honestly don't think this book should have been split-POV. If anything, I think this book should've focused on Coa and then a second book focused on Ife. It's possible that it could have worked if the author had structured things a bit differently, but the way it is in the ARC felt very... disjointed. Mostly due to the fact that the POVs switch every few chapters rather than every other chapter. This has the unfortunate side effect of cutting through any tension or build-up of action (usually occurring in Coa's POV) before jumping to Ife's which was often more politically driven or, honestly, heavy world-building.

While I applaud the author for going so deep into the world-building, I do question whether it was entirely necessary in this book. It felt like an overburdening of information. Especially because there were bits of world-building that were dropped in Ife's chapters that were then later dropped in Coa's POV. It just felt like too much and, again, really cut into the action.

Overall, this just wasn't for me. Even as an arc, I think this book needs a lot more work really tightening up the story and the pacing.