Author: Traci Chee
Series: Sea of Ink and Gold
Genre: YA Fantasy,
Publication date: September 13, 2016
Book Description: Sefia knows what it means to survive. After her father is brutally murdered, she flees into the wilderness with her aunt Nin, who teaches her to hunt, track, and steal. But when Nin is kidnapped, leaving Sefia completely alone, none of her survival skills can help her discover where Nin’s been taken, or if she’s even alive. The only clue to both her aunt’s disappearance and her father’s murder is the odd rectangular object her father left behind, an object she comes to realize is a book—a marvelous item unheard of in her otherwise illiterate society. With the help of this book, and the aid of a mysterious stranger with dark secrets of his own, Sefia sets out to rescue her aunt and find out what really happened the day her father was killed—and punish the people responsible.
Thoughts:
This is an interesting concept. In this world traditional Latin alphabet has been banned, and in such a systematic way that the common folk have completely forgotten about it. This means we have a language we come to see as English is spoken here but they do not write using our alphabet, but the culture has symbols or pictures to represent things, so the writing is a different sort and one of the main secrets in this story is the existence of the Latin alphabet and the existence of books with this language. There is no excuse or reasoning that we know of. We start right off the bat in the middle of the story and the world is not explained like a beginner, we get ideas as the story progresses.
Sefia is a young woman, at the start of the story she finds out her father has been tortured and killed. She has been trained from infancy on hiding. The thing is, she wasn't aware there was danger lurking behind them. She takes the secret object her family has kept hidden and runs to the only other person her family is close to, her Aun Nin.
As they continue to be on the run, Sefia becomes obsessed with the object her parents have kept a secret. She teaches herself how to read, she did have a bit of informal teaching when she was a young child but the lessons stopped with her mother's death. She starts discovering an ability, she can see things that others cannot but it's so confusing and hard to summon.
We also start to get a few other backstories of what's going on. We see Archer, a young man who has been kidnapped and forced to fight for his life in a twisted illegal fighting ring. Sefia runs into him after she has been separated from Nin and they start travelling together.
We get a story within a story. She starts to read the book and the story being told in it. Eventually, she will start to meet the people from the story and realize that the 'book' is showing her real people. It’s really quite genius the way the stories are intertwined throughout the plot. We read short stories as Sefia reads them in the book. They’re all deeply connected showing how complex the world can be. It’s nearly impossible not to feel invested. One of my favorite things is the pirates, with them, you start to see some of their cultural beliefs on death and their aspiration of leaving stories after you die. There is so much meaning in these words. The writing is truly brilliant.
The story is quick to get through, it has a lot of my beloved buzzwords:
Magic- it is a very soft magic, not really explained.
We have a prophecy about the savior/ end of all evil and wars in the world. Very vague but it's there.
Found Family
There is a group of friendly pirates, think of it like the equivalent of Luffy and his crew from One Piece. Anyway, there is a lot going on in this story, a lot of characters so hold your horses and if possible take notes.
Oh, another thing I did not mention, this book if you are reading in a physical format at least has very in-point imagery. The book adds a little something with markings on several pages such as smudges, fingerprints, burned or ripped pages, etc. There are also hidden words throughout making up a fun message by the end. The attention to detail in marking the clues, the book within a book, etc. quite charming. This was definitely an outstanding debut. I cannot wait to see where the story goes next.
I gave this
This was used for the following challenges:
Books about books
Read more YA
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