Trying to summarize in a few words what this book means to me and why I loved it so much is almost as hard as trying to count the stars in the sky. Because, after waiting an endless summer for it to come out (I discovered about it at end of June), in October “Crier’s War” was finally in my hands and it was all that I had imagined it to be and even more.
CRIER’S WAR, Nina Varela
★★★★★
After the War of Kinds ravaged the kingdom of Rabu, the Automae, designed to be the playthings of royals, usurped their owners’ estates and bent the human race to their will.
Now Ayla, a human servant rising in the ranks at the House of the Sovereign, dreams of avenging her family’s death…by killing the sovereign’s daughter, Lady Crier.
Crier was Made to be beautiful, flawless, and to carry on her father’s legacy. But that was before her betrothal to the enigmatic Scyre Kinok, before she discovered her father isn’t the benevolent king she once admired, and most importantly, before she met Ayla.
Now, with growing human unrest across the land, pressures from a foreign queen, and an evil new leader on the rise, Crier and Ayla find there may be only one path to love: war.
The medieval-dystopian world this book portrays is, in its concept, an unicum: we see humans at the low level of the society, while automae are at the head of it. Those projected to be nothing more than companions, more pets than anything else, are now the rulers; and it’s fascinating, for once, to see ourselves as the weak ones.
We are firstly introduced in in this world through Crier’s eyes, and it’s simple to fall in love in love with a character like her, Made but human in her own way: maybe it’s that * something * that makes her different from any other automae, her fear of being imperfect and unfitted for the role she was projected for, that made me care deeply about her since the start.
Because there is this special light in Crier, something that seems to balance the darkness that has almost eaten Ayla’s whole heart. “Love brings nothing but death”: it’s what Ayla has learned in the hard way when she was only a child, the * precept * that ruled her whole life from the moment she was saved by Rowan from dying in the cold and made her grow up with revenge as her dearest companion. And so it becomes clear that, in fact, the purpose around which her whole life revolves wasn’t a choice (as my dearest Benji once said): as Crier was made to be daughter of the sovereign, his heir, Ayla was shaped by her family’s death into a tool needed for give them justice.
But, for Crier, Ayla became the center of her whole universe from the moment she saves her near the sea; and there is something beautiful about the way Crier falls in love with Ayla, like eating after weeks of starvation or drinking after days alone in the desert: once Crier tasted what loving Ayla felt like, she couldn’t get enough of it. Even if Crier sees her love as a flawless, even if she thinks that there is something wrong in her for feeling something so strong, making her weak like the humans she is meant to rule, she can’t help it.
Both Crier and Ayla, in fact, fear falling in love.
What will you do if your greatest enemy started to treat you kindly, to care for you, to spoil you with little things like no one ever did before? You would fall for them, OF COURSE YOU WOULD.
I really need to take a moment to show my appreciation for the way Nina portrays Ayla’s internal conflict, her growing dilemma between what she wants and what she has to do; it’s so well written, so human, so true, that it definitely makes Ayla one of the best (and most well written) characters I’ve ever read.
There is a sort of balance in the way Nina tells her story, a perfect equilibrium between losing yourself in her characters’ thoughts and living the story as if you were part of it, running through the palace hidden by shadows with Ayla and dancing in the garden under a constellation of infinite stars with Crier.
“Crier’s War” is poetic, like love, and cruel, like life. And definitely one of the best (and most important) books I’ve ever read in my whole life.
Fear, Love, Passion: those are the key words of this books, those are the feelings that really make us human.
