Reviews with content warning for Self harm - First, Become Ashes

Reviews tagging 'Self harm'

First, Become Ashes by K.M. Szpara

21 reviews

spacebetweenpages's review against another edition

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dark emotional sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

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surefinewhatever_'s review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

Magic (or maybe not?), cults, fandom culture, queer folks who get to exist and go on quests, this book hit so many marks for me. The themes of friendship and support and trust were really compelling. Though the darker parts of this book were incredibly hard for me to stomach (so please refer to the Trigger Warnings). I also felt that the author didn’t even need to include Deryn’s perspective to the split narrative. It wasn’t as present or fleshed out as the others, nor did it have much to offer to the story or plot. Overall, Deryn felt further neglected (which whether that irony because of Deryn’s story was intentional or not, tough to say). I think the text would have been stronger had that been scrapped. The rest of the then/now split worked for me, and it made sense to see Lark, Kane, & Calvin on this journey. This is a really heavy read about navigating trauma, life outside of a cult, and the possibility of magic. Moving, but tough tough tough.

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moatzilla's review against another edition

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challenging tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

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arithegnome's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Content Warnings

kelseyland's review against another edition

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dark emotional tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

I think that readers who have extensive familiarity with or participation in fandom culture are the ideal audience for this book, which deals extensively in tropes/topics that are popular in fanfiction but might be jarring for other readers. It's an intense book and deals extensively with trauma, so I would definitely recommend reading and heeding the content warning printed in the book.

Content warning, per book flap: First, Become Ashes contains explicit sadomasochism and sexual content, as well as abuse and consent violations, including rape.

Content Warnings

bookshelfsos's review against another edition

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adventurous slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

1.5

Why do I do this to myself? Why? I knew I probably wouldn't like First, Become Ashes because I didn't like Docile. But damn if the premise and the marketing didn't get me again.

The blurb on the front of this book promises that it will "tackle trauma and healing without flinching" which was incredibly misleading to the point of being irresponsible. Because while there is trauma - heaps of self-harm, abuse, and rape - there is no healing. At least not on the page. The journey from Lark being brainwashed by the cult he grew up in to "healed" is akin to teleportation: we were there one minute and now we're here. Tada! This is not a story about cult deprogramming. It is not a story about someone coming to terms with abuse. This is a story about tropes that Szpara thinks are fun and cutesy pop culture references, off-puttingly intertwined with graphic and intensely unsexy sex scenes.

Speaking of which, it feels irresponsible not to mention a warning about the sex scenes. Particularly if you are coming to this book looking for sensitivity around the subject of sexual assault or healing from sexual abuse, please know that you’re not going to get that here. The book warns you about the content at the beginning, but a content warning doesn’t have the context to inform the reader that this book doesn’t just contain scenes of sexual assault. It revels in them with voyeuristic pleasure (literally). If it seems like it might be more that just a bit irresponsible to lure readers in with a story of “healing from abuse” and then offer instead rape erotica, then I’m going to go ahead and call this book irresponsible. If you want to write rape erotica, do that. If you enjoy dark tropes, have the self-respect to own that. Just don’t dress up your darker fantasies in the politically correct language of the day and try to pass it off as “healing”.

Ok, with that out of the way I guess I’ll touch on some positives. I will say that I actually enjoyed the experience of reading First, Become Ashes more than Docile, mainly because I think Szpara has improved as a writer. So props to growth and development, I guess. I thought that the pacing and the technical aspects of the writing here were both good. Despite being very uninvested in the story (I can't really enjoy a story when I dislike every character), I managed to get through the book quickly and was actually curious about some of the more mysterious plot threads that were set up.

Who was Nova and where did she come from? Why would the city of Baltimore, in an otherwise entirely normal reality where they're hosting major conventions and have cool hipster neighborhoods, sell off hundreds of acres of a public park to a private individual and let them close it off and start a cult in the middle of the city? What did Deryn do to lose their position as an Anointed? Is magic real?

Sadly, the payoff for all of these questions is exactly nil. Not one of them will be answered, or at least not to my satisfaction.

The biggest frustration for me with First, Become Ashes is the wasted potential. In the right author's hands the story of two young men growing up in an abusive cult and then having one of them stop believing and "betray" the cult to the FBI is such a good hook. There is love and betrayal. There is confusion of what is real and what isn't. There are questions of loyalty and how far you should go to appease someone you love when they are doing harm to themselves. All of these questions make for compelling character motivations and arcs. But we never see that here because all 300 pages of First, Become Ashes are devoted to Szpara exploring things that he thinks are cute or cool to the detriment of any enjoyment that the reader might have had. I guess if your interests as a reader are perfectly aligned with the author's - if you enjoy Lord of the Rings, Dungeons & Dragons, Harry Potter, cosplay, nerd culture, *and* BDSM - then it's *possible* you might find this book right up your alley. I would not say that it's a guarantee though, because everything here is superficial and ultimately irrelevant to the story. The trappings of geekiness and of kinkiness are seemingly just there to entertain the author and anyone else who finds kinship in shared love of intellectual property. Sadly, that's not nearly enough for me and this book proved to be a frustration and a disappointment.

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freddielounds's review against another edition

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adventurous dark tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated

I had such high for hopes for this after loving their debut novel, Docile, so much; unfortunately this one fell a bit flat. The multiple perspectives failed to elevate the story in any, real meaningful way and left the pseudo-enesemble cast under developed. The story maintains such an intense focus on decided protagnoists Lark and Calvin, that, as a result, the perspectives and characters of Derryn and Kane (who we get entirely in the past as world building) fall a bit flat. Additionally, the lack of perspective from Nova was a missed opportunity. Both the beliefs and practices of the cult as well as the extent of Nova's villainy are mostly left off page. To be clear, though Nova by no means comes across as a good person (the few flashbacks we do get are trully awful) there's a layer of removal there that creates a disconnect with the story. There is simply not nearly enough of her on the page for Nova to represent much more than an idea of a character. The fellowship as a whole felt underdeveloped and unexplored and Agent Miller is never given enough time on the page despite, as Nova's child, the story positioning her as the indirect cause of the cult's existence. It almost feels like she belongs in an entirely different story. Calvin's interests feel more like a convinient plot device vs. concious character choice, but, again, that may also be a symptom of how underdeveloped the entire novel feels as a whole.

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foreverinastory's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

Content Warnings

booksthatburn's review against another edition

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dark tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

1.0

I loved the first third of the book when I thought the story was, “A young man raised to believe magic is real has to deal with finding out that neither it nor the monsters he was raised to fight actually exist”. However, it soon became apparent that that wasn't where the book was going. The narrative was consistently invested in keeping readers off kilter as to whether/how magic was or was not real. I think we get an answer at the very end, but it feels like I spent the whole book being juked, so when it does finally pick a direction I’m tired instead of being excited that I finally know.

The main characters are adults when most of the narrative takes place, but it’s ambiguous as to how many of the flashbacks featuring descriptions of abuse took place when they were teens. That made me very uncomfortable. It’s a book about abuse and pain, and I don’t feel like I got enough aftercare as a reader.

The world building is minimal, I don’t have a good understanding of what day-to-day life was actually like before the book started, after the first couple of chapters the main details of life in the compound are all about the abuse. The abuse is definitely a focus, but it makes it hard to understand why anyone would stay. Not to question why anyone actually ends up staying in a cult, I mean, but you think there would be some camaraderie or warmth or positive *something* between the members, and if it was there the book doesn’t show it. It’s extremely focused on a handful of characters and doesn’t appear to care much about any of the others. The handling of the FBI agent also felt a little too neat, especially when we find out why she’s the one involved.

There’s a point of view character and a secondary character where I don’t know why they’re in the book. I understand what they do, but it’s so minimal that, for the secondary character, if she weren’t in the book at all I wouldn’t notice. It feels like she’s there so that one of the MCs can be uncompromising in a particular scene and still have things work out okay. The POV character who felt irrelevant technically had a different perspective than the other main characters, but most of their role in the story could’ve been absorbed by one of the others with very little change. It felt like they existed as a cautionary tale, ready to infodump when needed and stay away when they weren’t being useful.

It's very hard to pull off an ending that is basically, "hey, we can power the machines by laughter instead of screams" á la the movie "Monsters, Inc" (2001), when the first 70% of the book is dedicated to making it unclear whether the machines are powered at all by anything, or if electricity even works. Lark's rose-colored glasses and insistence that magic is real made it feel like he got to exit the book without growing at all. He escaped an abusive situation, and I'm glad for him, he seems like he's in a better place, but I really dislike the ending, I think it undercuts what was so good about the start of the book. What hooked me was the prospect of watching someone slowly realize that their life had been a lie, finally getting objective proof that they were wrong, and having to deal with the emotional wreckage of that. What happens instead is that we find out they were right that it's real, and his journey is that he learns he can just use a different source. I have so many questions about the version of reality where if you think magic is real you can just do magic and other people can see it too. That would utterly transform everything about the setting, it just couldn't be the same setting if people really casually did magic.

If this were a psychological horror novel I would love it so much, though the ending and a few middle scenes would have to change, but the “actually magic is real you just don’t have to power it with pain” ending undercuts all the rest of the stuff with the cult. The idea that “magic is real and requires pain, and nothing is worth the pain of children” can take you really cool places, and this book decided not to go to any of them, so at the end I just feel confused and lost. If you're going to hook me with the intro and then subvert the premise, your subversion needs to be better than playing it straight.

Content Warnings

ninegladiolus's review against another edition

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challenging dark tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

After enjoying Szpara’s debut novel, Docile—while also recognizing and acknowledging the important critiques around how race was represented within it—I wanted to give his sophomore work a shot. I’m a sucker for cult stories, unreliable narrators, messy relationships, and explorations of deep rooted trauma, especially when they involve queer characters and are written by a queer author, and that’s what I thought I would be getting out of this. And I did get that… sort of? The ‘sort of’ part is more where my critique of First, Become Ashes rests.

Before we begin, I want to preface this review by stating that my rating isn’t influenced by the content warned for at the beginning of the book: “explicit sadomasochism and sexual content, as well as abuse and consent violations, including rape.” I can confirm those are all present and in many cases rendered in excruciating detail, so if any of those themes are upsetting to you at all, please give this one a pass. Having spent so much time in the realm of fanfiction (which is wonderful, contains many valid and beautiful stories both explicit and for general audiences, and is a valid form of writing and reading and personal exploration), there’s… y’all, there’s not a lot I HAVEN’T seen at this point. The two stars is not for the content that is sometimes deeply disturbing, sometimes charged and erotic, and sometimes a deliberate mixture of the two many may find challenging or not for them.

The story follows three primary POVs: Lark, our protagonist and Anointed one who is deeply entrenched in the abuse and beliefs of the Fellowship; Kane, his Anointed partner in multiple senses of the word who leaves Lark and then shows up again during the FBI raid on the Fellowship that opens up the book; and Calvin, successful cosplayer, influencer, and all around nerd. We also have Deryn, a non-binary POV character who believes themself to be Lark’s sibling, who has chapters sporadically throughout the novel. In addition to these four rotating POVs, we also have different time lines, split into Now/’Confidential’ (Past).

I think this novel suffered for the jarring and tonally dissonant mashing up of time lines. In the now, we follow Lark’s journey after the cult is busted but while he still believes he needs to go on his quests to kill ambiguously referenced ‘monsters’, teaming up with Calvin after they encounter one another at a convention by chance. From numerous pop culture references—including 6 or 7 Harry Potter references, which truly I thought we were done with—to wild treks in the woods, to learning how to use a cell phone, to sadomasochistic rituals on the side of the highway to recharge ‘magic’, to sensual hair washing, the Now time line is all over the place for me. Even with the wide swathe of topics covered in the Now, I could still get on board with it if it was more focused on Lark and how he comes to terms with the raid on the Fellowship and his subsequent entry into the ‘real’ world.

However, the juxtaposition of the ‘Confidential’ time line, which largely deals with Kane recounting the massive amounts of trauma and abuse the members of the Fellowship underwent (and contains the most intense, though not all, of the content warnings listed at the beginning of the book/review) made the structure of this book hard to follow. I don’t feel this novel was well served by the insertion of Massive Trauma, Stage Left after the chaotic modern day shenanigans of the other time line. A narrative digging deep into the Fellowship and its abuses, while it would have been hard to read, would have made for a more compelling story. As it stands, even though I don’t believe this was the intent of choosing to interweave the two stories, Kane’s ‘Confidential’ time line ended up feeling wildly jarring and out of place. It seemed positioned for shock value in some cases and taboo titillation—which again, your kink is not my kink—in others which disrupted the coherency of the story. Add in Deryn’s POV, which I’m still not sure what it aimed to accomplish aside from a thin link to ideas about familial connection and redemption (even though hey, non-binary character who uses they/them pronouns, cool), and you have a tangled mess of elements pulling in several entirely separate directions.

The other main reason this book didn’t work for me was a lack of character motivation. We are told Lark needs to kill a monster, but we are not sold on the why other than ‘he believes it’, and the comparatively little space we get of him unpacking his trauma feels rushed. We are meant to believe Calvin would leave his normal, successful life complete with friends and support systems on two premises: that he’s so desperate to feel special he wants to believe ‘magic’ exists, and that Lark looks super hot dressed as an elf. Kane has the strongest and most sensible motivations in the beginning, but some of the choices he makes late game are perplexing and nonsensical to me. And again, beyond Deryn’s conviction that a blood relation means something, I wasn’t sold on why they chose to do the things they did within the novel beyond the motivations I was told and not shown.

Add in weak antagonists who are poorly developed or taken off screen without a satisfying payoff for the reader, women painted exclusively as sidekicks or villains yet again, and several key elements of the worldbuilding left ambiguous to the point of ‘frustrating’ instead of ‘intriguing’, and I sadly have to say First, Become Ashes wasn’t for me.

Your mileage, of course, may vary. I would have loved to see either the cult trauma or the (anti?) hero’s journey story lines delved into more deeply rather than the confusing mash that was the two. The jury is out at this point if I will be picking up another Szpara novel; despite his exploration of topics I SHOULD be interested in, I think there’s just too much of a differential in the lenses we approach them through. As long as you are in a space to handle the provided content warnings, I think those who choose to pick it up will have strong opinions one way or the other about First, Become Ashes. It’s not a story that provides a lot of room for a middle of the road opinion, and unfortunately I fell on the less favourable side.

Thank you to Tor and NetGalley for an advance copy in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

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