Fifty feet up, in a city whose rulers would execute her for being inside it, a girl is inching along a branch that has started to creak. A spider crawls over her wrist and she cannot flick it away, because letting go means falling, and falling is the one thing she is genuinely afraid of. A cat waits further along, growing impatient. Jump, the cat tells her. Jump like a cat. Empire by Sabaa Tahir is a five-hundred-page war novel with a collapsing empire in it, and the scene a reading group will still be laughing about a week later is this one.
Empire by Sabaa Tahir Opens on a Losing War
The setup, briefly, for anyone deciding whether their group can take this on. This is the second book after Heir, which itself followed a four-book series, and the war is already lost in every direction that matters. An invading people hold the cities, they are bombing anything that moves, and their leader fuels her magic by drawing the life out of other people. She has started with children, because children last longer.
Against her: a crown prince who inherited a magic he considers obscene, a tracker with a monster attached to her soul, an empress working through a wound that should have stopped her, and two enemies sent halfway round the world together who cannot stand each other.
Empire by Sabaa Tahir opens with a prologue that recaps the previous volume in plain prose. It is generous and it is not sufficient. A group coming to this cold will follow the plot and miss why three of the deaths land.
The Pilot Who Never Wanted the Prophecy
The best thread here belongs to Cero, a pilot for the invading side, and Karinna, a rebel from the invaded one who has been sent to find out what he is hiding.
Their chapters do something the rest of the novel does not quite manage, which is move at a human pace. She cannot admit she is lonely, so she is cruel instead. He tends her injuries without mentioning it and lays the warmer blanket over her while she sleeps. She learns her own magic only when an animal gives her the trick: speak into me, not at me. There is a comic sequence in which she must win over a flock of tiny winged messengers by performing a rite of contrition they invent purely to humiliate her, and the fact that she goes through with it is the first sign she might be someone other than who her family says.
That is the group’s entry into her. She has been likened to the most notorious murderer in her country’s history, and the first person to make the comparison was her own mother, a celebrated storyteller whose judgement everybody trusts. Karinna has decided that settles it. Watching somebody else look at her and reach a different conclusion is, quietly, the most moving thing in Empire by Sabaa Tahir.
Cero gets the other half. He has been handed a prophecy about a saviour he has spent his life calling a convenient fiction, and his fear of it is not modesty. He knows he is bad with people, and suspects a leader who cannot comfort anyone makes a poor one. A refreshingly practical objection from a reluctant chosen one.
What Sabaa Tahir Asks About Children
Midway through, the history of this entire world gets rewritten, and the rewrite is an argument rather than a twist.
The details are best met on the page, but the shape is this: a very old atrocity was committed against a group with no power to resist it, nobody was called to account, and every catastrophe in the present, the famine that started this war included, is interest still accruing on that debt. One character eventually states the position outright. When a child suffers, no account is ever settled. The adult responsible files the suffering under war, or nation, or pride, and moves on.
It is a bold thing for Empire by Sabaa Tahir to put at the centre of a series aimed at teenagers, and it does not curdle into a lecture because the evidence is supplied across four separate lives before anyone says it aloud. Every principal carries an injury an adult decided, on their behalf, was acceptable.
Loyalty or Freedom, Every Single Day
The empress carries the book’s other question, and hers is the thread that will divide a room.
She has ruled for two decades and chosen duty over every private happiness ever offered her, and she is not held up as an example. She is held up as a warning, gently and with great affection. Her advice to her nephew is not that he abandon his people. It is that the choice between obligation and a life of his own arrives fresh every morning, and that some mornings he is permitted to pick himself.
Whether Empire by Sabaa Tahir then follows its own advice is genuinely open, and worth putting to a room late in the evening.
Where Empire by Sabaa Tahir Overreaches
Five narrators, one of whom has stopped developing. The invader queen’s chapters become status reports for a long stretch, while the two most interesting people share a single strand.
The middle is a travelogue. Two parallel expeditions, one overland and one oceanic, both beautifully described and both a third longer than the story requires.
A council of six is really a council of two. The sorceress-queens arrive with a distinguishing talent apiece and then speak as one sceptical voice.
Coming back from the dead becomes routine. By the third revival nobody is frightened for anyone, which is odd in a book this interested in grief.
A rule the novel swears is permanent turns out not to be. Decide as a room whether the final act earns that or simply wants it both ways.
Weigh the content first. Marketed at fourteen and up. Civilians bombed at length. Several children killed on the page as fuel for someone’s magic, one while asking for help. A prisoner’s throat cut. A woman trapped in a fire and audible for pages. A heart taken out of a living body. A suicide framed and coaxed as sacrifice. Possession, in which a woman’s mouth says things she is screaming against. Starvation as policy. A child’s corpse held and mourned at length. A brief account of a boy selling himself for food. A sex scene near the end markedly more explicit than anything earlier in this world.
Any group taking on Empire by Sabaa Tahir must begin with Heir, the necessary first half and the weaker of the pair. For the same interest in what an occupying power does to the generation beneath it, The Last Tiger by Julia Riew and Brad Riew is the natural companion, while The Last Contract of Isako by Fonda Lee treats loyalty as a trap in half the pages. The Sixth Faction by Veronica Roth suits a room that wants this scale with fewer viewpoints, and Cleopatra by Saara El-Arifi is the better pick for anyone who came for the ruler rather than the war.
For the Group
Start with the rebel and her mother. Is a parent’s verdict on a child ever simply wrong, or does saying it aloud make it partly true? Then the empress: was her life’s choice admirable or a waste, and does the book know what it thinks?
There is a case to argue about the reluctant leader too. He says he cannot unite people because he does not much like them. Is that disqualifying, or is survivor guilt doing the talking in a man who has outlived nearly everyone he grew up with?
And the hard one. The resolution requires somebody to want to die. Given who volunteers and how they are persuaded, is that a sacrifice or a very patient execution?
After the Last Page
Empire by Sabaa Tahir is a better book than the one before it, and the reason is structural. Tahir has stopped treating memory as a power and started treating it as her subject, so the magic, the villain, the grief and the final rescue are one material handled four ways.
It is too long, it carries a narrator it does not need, and it bends one of its own laws when the ending requires bending. It also finishes on a note of such quiet defiance, slipped into a character’s hand by someone who ought not to be there, that a room will spend its last ten minutes arguing whether it is a gift or a provocation. Both, probably. That is generally how this author works.