Sal uses gentle and jagged words to tell her story. These books are full of exceptional descriptions of magical places and wonderful(ly awful) people. It has a clear cost structure, varied use, social and political influence, and - oh yeah - Sal has a big fuck-off magical gun. The magic system in the Grave of Empires is expansive.
Laugh, cry, feel a pang of nostalgia for something you never had. I want to get into some specific spoilers with this review, so I’ll give my rating up front. I appreciate the development of Sal’s character because when we pull back the vulgar facade, we see her for what she really is: a broken person who lost something deeply important to her. He manages to capture and accurately portray what anxiety feels like, what it does to the mind and the body. And I really have to give that last one to Sykes. Underneath that scarred, violent exterior, she is rife with the things that make her human. Under that edgy mask there is so often… nothing. The vengeful loner with dead parents, a black wardrobe, a bloody blade, and a lexicon containing every curse word known to humans, elves, dwarves, et al. I’ve often found that authors use vulgarity and crassness as a mask for their edgelord characters.
Swearing usually isn’t my cup of tea, but fuck me if these books didn’t win me over. Hell, I agonized about including one curse in my first edit of Call to Fire for more than a week.
And that’s usually a huge turn-off for me. Which says a lot about Sykes’ work, because both books are vulgar as fuck. Every single second I could spend in Sykes’ world learning about Sal and Jindu and Liette and Jero, Lastlight and Littlebarrow and Stark’s Mutter, was a second I adored. Every quiet moment was spent following the tale of her quest for revenge. Every spare minute I had was spent indulging myself in the stories told by Sal the Cacophony.
Sam Sykes, author of Seven Blades in Black and Ten Arrows of Iron - together the first two novels in the Grave of Empires series, has managed to craft a world so broad, so magical, and so gripping, I couldn’t put down the books.
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