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Title: Ashes
Author: Steven Manchester
Publisher: Story Plant
Reviewed By: Arlena Dean
Rating: Five
Review:
"Ashes" by Steven Manchester
My Thoughts...
'Ashes' was quite some story about two brother Tom and Jason Prendergast. These two brothers
hadn't been together for many years [15]mainly due to their hateful abusive father and now he was dead and had requested them to make a drive together to Seattle in order to take and spread his ashes. Now, they had to do this in order to get the 'contents of a sealed envelope their father had lift with his lawyer.' At this point I wondered why it was so important to get this envelope especially since the way their father had mistreated them so horribly while growing up. What in the world would this man be leaving them that was worth this trip? What turns out to be a trip from hell also turns out to be so much more as these two brothers travel together to Seattle. What these two brothers find out during this trip will truly have you shaking your head and saying how more crueler could this father have been! Wow! I don't want to spoil it for you the reader other than saying this is one well written story to pick up and read. I enjoyed how this author was able to give the reader a little humor and even some tears in the midst of what all was going on in this read. In the end will these two brothers be able to get over the abuse they both suffered during their dysfunctional childhood and now they were both parents how has this affected their present life? I liked how this author puts the storyline together with answering all the questions....to how will this trip end? Along the trip who all did they come in contact with? Was this trip with getting that 'envelope' left from their father? What happens in Tom and Jason's 'brotherly relationship' after this trip? All of these questions and so much more will be answered fully in this excellent read.
So, be ready for a very tensed, emotional journey, sentimental, a travel across country, little mystery and even some humor as "Ashes" will bring it all to you front and center all the way to the very end. Would I recommend? YES!
The story is told in the first person, alternating between the perspectives of Elias and Laia, sometimes handing off during interactions of theirs and those bits have been especially fun.
Love the character progression of every single character. Loved the bits of humanity and the bits of ice in every single character. Loved the way the fights were settled. Loved the way the Augers seem to have everything planned and executed. I'm interested in seeing their end game. Their involvement was very Old Testament God to me. Maybe I've just been in the Old Testament for too long. I even appreciated the slow burn to the romance and the way it seemed to sidestepped one of my least favorite YA tropes. I even loved the way that one death left me with the feeling that story had just lost its most decent character, no I won't tell you which one. It left with my with a slight hangover and I had to keep it for a little extra time after finishing just so I can listen to my favorite parts over again. I listened to the book, which was over 15 hours, and the narrators were just amazing. Steve West did Elias's perspective and Fiona Hardingham did Laia's.
Altogether, 4 stars for being in love and for breaking the mold a bit. Anyone into YA would love this, including adults. It's also a great read for anyone doing the year of reading women of color put on by the Goodreads group 500 Great Books by Women or otherwise interested in diversity in books!
I am now on hold for the sequel, A Torch Against the Night
Hello, everyone! Last month, I gathered a round-up of adaptation news from the past six to seven months that I had covered in my bookish rounds posts. The six to seven months was an arbitrary number, and I had missed some adaptation news in choosing that limit.
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| A Calender of 2016 Young Adult and Middle Grade Adaptations. Click to enlarge the image. |
Very occasionally, in the midst of all the other books, you come across one that feels like it was written literally and specifically for you. An Inheritance of Ashes is one of those books for me. As such–fair warning–the rest of this post is not even going to be remotely unbiased.
There are several things that An Inheritance of Ashes has going for it. I loved the richness of the language; it’s a marvelous combination of realistic (and often funny) dialogue, and poetic prose without a misplaced word. The book opens like this: “The barley was in. The stubble of it lay bent-broke in the fields as far as the eye could see, rows of golden soldiers, endlessly falling, from the river to the blacktop road. On a clear evening, with the harvesting done, you could see both river and road from the farmhouse porch: every acre, lined in sunset light, of Roadstead Farm.” It’s lovely to read, and on re-reading it just now, I caught so many echoes that we’ll see later on in the book.
But while language is certainly important, for me as a reader characters will make or break a book. And here they make it. I cared about all of them: Marthe, and Heron, and Asphodel Jones. Even the more minor characters read as rounded and vibrant in their own right. As I think about it, I suspect that this is quite intentional; that we are supposed to see all of these people as real and important.
However, Hallie, our narrator, is central to this story. We have a tight first person narration here; we see everything through her eyes, through her experiences, and personality, and biases. Bobet is quite aware of this and plays with it throughout the book. While I wouldn’t say that Hallie is exactly an unreliable narrator, we are reminded several times that her point of view is not the only one.
Hallie’s voice is clear and strong and wonderful. She is neither perfect nor passive. She reads as very human: flawed, stubborn, contradictory, full of hope and fear and wanting to love. I completely and utterly believed in her.
The other area where An Inheritance of Ashes really shone for me was in the themes. Partly this is personal–the way Hallie and Marthe’s family is described, the way they struggle to deal with that past while not letting it define them, the way they don’t always succeed–all of that rang so familiar and so true that it felt almost eerie. It moved me to tears several times. I kept thinking, “Yes. This is how it is. This is how it feels. This is how I feel.”
But as well as this aspect, I also truly appreciated the way the book shows the importance of relationships, that our strength lies in each other. That it lies in reaching out, beyond all hope (a little bit of Cordelia Vorkosigan there, maybe). And again there’s that moment when Hallie’s perspective is shown to be limited, when the twists of the past are finally unknotted and we see, with her, a different truth. It might not have worked, but here it does, and it reinforces the idea that by reaching towards others, we can find our own strength.
Finally, I’ll mention that I found the worldbuilding and imagery here fantastic, and gorgeous, and scary, in all the right ways. There’s a lot of depth and richness to the images and the way they tie into the worldbuilding. I really felt that sense of history lying behind the story that we don’t see but that informs everything else.
I’m so glad that the Cybils gave me a reason to pick this one up; it’it will absolutely be one of my favorite books for the year, and one I intended to re-read regularly.
Book information: 2015, Clarion Books; YA
Book source: review copy from the publisher provided for the Cybils
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Other reviews: The Midnight Garden, Teen Reads, Kirkus, you?
