TITLE: First, Become Ashes
AUTHOR: K.M. Szpara
304 pages, Publisher, ISBN 9781250216182 (hardcover, also available in e-book and audio)
DESCRIPTION: (from Goodreads): The Fellowship raised Lark to kill monsters. His partner betrayed them to the Feds. But Lark knows his magic is real, and he’ll do anything to complete his quest.
For thirty years, the Fellowship of the Anointed isolated its members, conditioning them to believe that pain is power. That magic is suffering. That the world beyond the fence has fallen prey to monsters. But when their leader is arrested, all her teachings come into question. Those touched by the Fellowship face a choice: how will they adjust to the world they were taught to fear, and how will they relate to the cult's last crusader, Lark? For Kane, survival means rejecting the magic he and his lover suffered for. For Deryn, the cult's collapse is an opportunity to prove they are worth as much as their Anointed brother. For Calvin, Lark is the alluring embodiment of the magic he's been seeking his entire life. But for Lark, the Fellowship isn’t over. Before he can begin to discover himself and heal a lifetime of traumas, he has a monster to slay. First, Become Ashes contains explicit sadomasochism and sexual content, as well as abuse and consent violations, including rape.
MY RATING: 4 out of 5 stars
MY THOUGHTS: In First, Become Ashes, K.M. Szpara asks some heavy questions about belief and identity, filtered through the first-person narration of four quite different voices: a true believer, a former believer, a skeptical believer, and an outsider who wants to believe. Any one of these characters could have narrated the entire book and the story would have been compelling enough. Splitting the narration between the four allows readers to read between the lines of their individual stories to see a bigger picture. Multiple narrators also allow the author to show some of the breadth and depth of how different people process trauma and abandonment.
At its heart, First, Become Ashes is about how belief shapes identity, and how loss of belief can sometimes shatter that sense of self (unless something equally worth believing in replaces it). In this regard, lovers Lark and Kane are a study in contrasts. When we first meet Lark, he is resolute in his belief in the teachings of Nova and the Fellowship. Nova can do no wrong, anything she requires of him must be for the good of the community no matter how painful or unpalatable it might be. Lark is willing to be used and abused if it means he’s really as special as Nova claims; he’s willing to abuse others if it means he gets to fulfill the destiny laid out for him in whatever passes for the Fellowship’s scriptures. When we finally read chapters from Kane’s perspective, we see a man who has lost all faith in the tradition in which he was raised. He recognizes Nova’s abuses for what they are; he realizes that in believing her lies he’s been forced to hurt the man he loves and be hurt in turn. Lark’s total devotion to the cause empowers his magic – Kane’s departure from the faith destroys his. As Lark goes on his quest to hunt a monster, to fulfill what he’s been trained and raised to do, questions about whether Kane and others might be right in their assessment of Nova’s rituals and intent lead to Lark’s magic seeming to fail him in certain situations. Wanting to bring Lark home safely, to rescue the man he loves from their former life, Kane’s magic seems to work in certain situations despite his lack of belief. Both men wonder if they can survive in a world without the control and structure the Fellowship demanded, as do the few other “Anointed” we meet.
As a Fellow rather than an Anointed, Deryn provides yet another point-of-view to be considered: what if the magic is real, even if the mission is false and the structure of the Fellowship is abusive? Anointed and then demoted, they question everything: their place in the Fellowship, their role as Lark’s sibling, their worth to the society outside the Fellowship. But they never really question the magic itself, and in fact encourage others to believe in it, including FBI Agent Miller who has been investigating the Fellowship her entire career. Deryn and Miller are characters whose separate experiences explicate how abandonment also shapes sense-of-self. Without spoiling anything, what they have in common is that they were both told they were something special, only to be told that they weren’t special enough. Everything Deryn and Miller do is motivated by needing to understand why things changed, why they were cast aside for others. There are no chapters from Miller’s perspective, so we never really get to see her own take on being abandoned, but her experiences are mirrored in Deryn and over time they become kindred spirits.
And then there’s Calvin: a cosplayer and social media “influencer” who is as aware of the Fellowship as anyone who lives near their compound in Baltimore but has no idea how deep the teachings go. Calvin would have been the target audience if someone had filmed a documentary or reality show about the Fellowship; he might even have been one of those folks who becomes obsessed with the subjects of such a show. Calvin combines aspects of the other characters in his “outsider” perspective. He has been abandoned by his family for not being what they wanted him to be (like Deryn and Miller), he desperately wants magic to be real (like Lark) but is appalled at the cost once he becomes aware of it (like Kane).
Readers should be warned that Szpara does not go light on the emotional or physical abuse these four characters have experienced. Most of it is revealed in flashback but some of it is current, and there’s no “fade to black / let the reader infer” when these events happen. I leave it up to survivors of abuse to discuss how accurate/realistic the characters’ reactions are. Likewise, I leave analysis of the consensual BDSM scenes to members of that community to weigh in on.
First, Become Ashes is not an easy read, with all of the raw emotional and physical trauma the four main characters experience. But it is an engrossing read with characters I came to deeply care about.
(NOTE: I read an e-ARC of First, Become Ashes which I received from NetGalley. I completed reading the book well before publication date but this review was delayed for a variety of reasons having nothing to do with the book itself.)