Review: As She Ascends

As She Ascends by Jodi Meadows
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"It's just building and building and becoming more and more toxic! It's a botched job!"
-The Thirteenth Doctor

I feel like not enough people are reading this trilogy, and when it comes to selling them at work...well, to paraphrase that one Imperial official whom Darth Vader was telling off at the start of Return of the Jedi say it, I shall double my efforts. Especially in the wake of this, the middle entry of the trilogy, which I'm feeling to be the Catching Fire high point - and, for sure, Jodi Meadows' best novel yet.


It's a long book, to be sure. Longer than Before She Ignites by about 75 pages or so, well over 500 in total. But I feel that, like with King's Cage for Victoria Aveyard, this book improves the world-building with great strides and also showcases Meadows' ever-growing maturity in her craft.

No longer does the story have a bunch of long "Before" and "After" sections - the first book's pacing really suffered based on that emulation of the Arrow style of storytelling over such a sustained length. Here, though, the story is told far more linearly, except for a few flashbacks in Aaru's POV. These are short and scattered throughout the book, but all-important because they highlight the specific circumstances leading up to his own imprisonment in the Pit - circumstances rooted in how unfortunately strictly the Idrisi traditionally interpret the Book of Silence.

The specific focus on Idris, a land of excessive religious patriarchy, further reinforces the trilogy's strongly resonating social-justice themes. As in the previous book, As She Ascends strongly rebukes not only institutional sexism, but also colonialism, nationalism, and government corruption. It also throws more than a few wrenches in the behind-the-scenes truth as seemingly set up in its predecessor, revealing that there's even more nastiness going on directly beneath everyone's noses than previously thought. And the ecological messages Meadows puts forth are just as powerful. The dragons - and believe you me, while the first book was absolutely NOT as lacking in dragons as some silly internet gooses would have you believe, this book, if adapted page for page to film, would have maybe two shots in total entirely devoid of dragons ranging from nuzzly to faithful to fearsome - just want to live as nature intended, if only there weren't a bunch of people in power taking pages from the Jurassic World playbook and trying to weaponize them. To say nothing of the noorestones and how eerily akin to nuclear power they are in the wrong hands. And of course, the impending doom that is the Great Abandonment.

Then there's the ongoing mental-illness rep provided by our lovely heroine Mira. Just like in the first book, she finds herself counting compulsively - though she can repurpose that particular symptom to be tactically very useful when the situation calls for it. She also experiences some panic attacks, but this time around, she has access to medication to stave off the worst of her symptoms. (It should be noted that she was prescribed these pills before, but they didn't allow her to take them in the Pit - sound familiar?) That's got to be a first, a high-fantasy novel in which mental-illness meds are present, and for that I applaud Meadows.

One final note - the romance between Mira and Aaru. They're a pretty shippable pair, and their relationship is one of the best slow burns you'll ever see. A lot of that owes to how they have to get past the differences in custom between their people - Mira being from a life of comfort and privilege, and from a permissive society, while Aaru grew up poor and struggled from day one in a society that literally silences all potential opposition. And as much as they can mutually communicate with Mira having learned Idrisi tapping code pretty quickly, there's still a lot of room for misinterpretation, which seemingly dooms their romance every time the heat rises - or does it? Perhaps they're just a bit too star-crossed to be doomed.

One more novel to go - When She Reigns, and you know I'm going to get my hands on that one as soon as possible. Now how many copies of these first two books can I sell at work before the end of the year? My goal is to at least sell us out of Before She Ignites at least once more.

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