It all feels very organic, and it has the added benefit of not slowing down the action – and action is still very much foremost among the reading pleasures Tahir provides. Instead, we learn everything we need to know about the previous book and its explosive climax from the characters themselves as they scramble to make sense of this unprecedented thing that's happened. There are no blocks of exposition wedged into the early chapters in order to bring readers up to speed. The book's action picks up the very moment where "An Ember in the Ashes" ended, and yet one of the first impressive things about "A Torch Against the Night" is how little it feels like a typical sequel. The book was wildly successful, and now we have the sequel, "A Torch Against the Night." In interviews at the time, Tahir commented that if the book was sufficiently successful, she'd love to continue telling the stories of this world and these characters.
What saved "An Ember in the Ashes" was its raw intensity and lean narrative momentum despite its slavish fidelity to a certain YA template, the book was very expertly readable.
The novel was well-received and gained an intensely devoted audience of readers, but even from such a cursory description, one thing should be obvious: "An Ember in the Ashes" was an intensely derivative work, a story clinging very closely to the formula made standard by such books as "Twilight" and "The Hunger Games," in which a young woman is thrust into prominence through no accomplishment of her own (she's genetically odd, she's the sibling of somebody in trouble, etc.), falls in love with a brooding young man despite his brusque treatment, and proceeds to re-shape the entire world in which she was born – adolescent wish-fulfillment of a very simplistic order. Her goal was to rescue her brother Darin from Martial prison, but in the process she encounters a handsome young Mask named Elias and feels an instant attraction for him – a feeling Elias eventually reciprocates even though it complicates his intention to desert from the Empire after graduation and walk away from the world of Northcliff's sadistic commandant, his own mother. Sabaa Tahir's 2015 debut novel "An Ember in the Ashes," introduced readers to a Young Adult fantasy world in which a young woman named Laia, one of the persecuted, peaceful Scholar minority, unexpectedly finds herself joining the Resistance movement that's formed to undercut the tyrannical authority of the Martial Empire and its ranks of elite soldiers called Masks, trained at the notorious Northcliff Academy.
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