An Ember in the Dawn of Night

5⭐️1🌶

Ooof and wow, this ARC of An Ember in the Dawn of Night by Emery Fynn broke me.  It was so good.  This post is going to have some mild spoilers because there's no other way to talk about just how clever Fynn's writing is.  This book tosses the reader right into the action unapologetically, there's no prologue, just bang, chapter one.  And right within those first couple of chapters the FMC is following a tip to a home where a family resides.  She proceeds to slaughter said family, then goes gets cleaned up, stops at her best friends house where they bone, so she can get out of her head.  Then she travels back to her own place.  There is very little world building or exposition, we're just along for the ride.  She mentions names of towns, districts, canal ways with no explanation you just have to guess or look at the map at the beginning.  I loved this.  It was refreshing and its disorienting.  I think its a plot device so we feel out of place or lost just like Lydia is at this point.  She's on a singular mission to avenge the deaths of her family that happened 15 years ago.  Lydia has tunnel vision,  so, so do we as the readers.  This is a single POV book all from Lydia's perspective.  Lydia garners another tip from the family before she murdered them, where her target will be.  She followes the tip, but its a trap and the man she's been hunting for the last 15 years, Griffon, captures her, neutralizes her magic and drags her to the stonetalon stronghold Falcos.  Once there she is brought before the Archon, who is an oracle essentially.  (More spoilers ahead)  Archon tells her she's a Gargoyle, like them, and she'll shift for the first time on her 30th birthday, which is mere days away.  Griffon is tasked with getting her ready for it, because shifting into stone is violent, disorienting and one looses themselves to it for potentially years.  Lydia doesn't believe the Archon.  She was born to human parents and fights tooth and nail at the situation.  Griffon trains her using a drug that shows you your absolute worst fear.  He explains briefly that shifting back to flesh requires one to focus.  He finds holding onto a memory can bring you back to yourself because when you shift to stone you become a mindless beast who wants nothing more than to kill everything in sight.  He administers the drug to put her in a state of abject fear, so she can bring herself out of it.  She is unable to grasp a memory that can bring her out and she stays in this manic stage for hours and hours.  When it finally wears off and she comes back to herself, we see the first tiny glimpse of compassion or remorse from Griffon.  In the beginning he hates Lydia about as much as she hates him, but for different reasons.  This story is very deep with mistakes, consequences of actions and grief from losses on both sides of the coin.  Griffon and Lydia are complex characters and there is so much between them, mostly misunderstanding.  Lydia only has a few days to prepare for the shift when most stonetalons have years.  Lydia manages to escape and goes to the town where the leader of the organization resides that were at the meet where Griffon captured her.  She wants answers about who set her up.  She confronts the leader and at midnight shifts to stone.  In stone she proceeds to shred this guy and an innocent bystander before Griffon can pull her back to flesh.  (I skipped over a pivitol scene here because I am trying to minimize spoilers.)  What I really wanted to shout about is this:  the majority of the book is written in first person past tense.  When Lydia shifts to stone it becomes first person present tense.  I thought this was very clever.  When in stone, these creatures are pretty much no more than animals.  She looses her memories, her train of thought.  The only thing she can focus on is whatever prey is in front of her and subsequently shredding it to pieces.  So being in present tense, she and the reader are in the moment.  Experiencing these events as they happen with no context of past or memory.  Then when she does shift back into flesh, it goes back to past tense.  Like she's telling us this story from her memories; her past experience.  I thought that was so clever and as such we could always tell if she was in flesh or stone at any point in the book based on what tense it was written in.  I'm not usually one to rip apart the writing like this, but I definitely noticed and I thought it was a magnificent addition.  This book really floored me.  I'm even more impressed this is a debut.  I've read three out of this world back to back debuts here and this one really takes the cake.  I hope it blows up big because it absolutely deserves it.  The puzzle of what is really going on, who is actually pulling the strings, where everything is going.  I'm still not sure.  When I finished yesterday, I actually discussed it with my husband.  I very rarely talk about books with him.  This one though.... I don't know what the endgame is.  Usually I can figure out enough to feel smug when it is revelaled. This one; I have no idea what the real motive is.  There is some serious betrayal in this one, if you hadn't already figured that out from my vague rambling.  This book was so complex.  I'm going to be stewing about it for a long time while I wait for the next book.  Check it out on the 25th!!