My book reviews for the Tales from the Edge trilogy by Rebecca Zahabi, including The Collarbound and The Hawkling. Please be aware that the review for the second book contains spoilers.

A MAN MARKED BY MAGIC. A WOMAN MARKED BY HER PAST.

On the other side of the Shadowpass, rebellion is brewing and refugees have begun to trickle into the city at the edge of the world. Looming high on the cliff is The Nest, a fortress full of mages who offer protection, but also embody everything the rebellion is fighting against: a strict hierarchy based on magic abilities.

When Isha arrives as a refugee, she attempts to fit in amongst the other mages, but her Kher tattoo brands her as an outcast. She can't remember her past or why she has the tattoo. All she knows is that she survived. She doesn't intend to give up now.

Tatters, who wears the golden collar of a slave, knows that this rebellion is different from past skirmishes. He was once one of the rebels, and technically, they still own him. He plans to stay in the shadows, until Isha appears in his tavern. He's never seen a human with a tattoo, and the markings look eerily familiar . . .

As the rebellion carves a path of destruction towards the city, an unlikely friendship forms between a man trying to escape his past and a woman trying to uncover hers, until their secrets threaten to tear them apart.

The Collarbound hooks from the opening page and will appeal to fans of magical, brink-of-war settings, like that of The Poppy War and The City of Brass.

This book was provided for free by NetGalley and the publishers in exchange for an honest review. Many thanks to the publisher and the author for the opportunity to read this book!

Content Warnings:

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I don’t think I have ever read a book that I enjoyed as much as The Collarbound while having no idea what the world of the book was about. Normally, if a book has terrible world-building, it’s a huge turn-off for me, and if that’s bad, the rest of the book is usually just as bad. However, The Collarbound‘s plot was interesting enough to keep me intrigued, and the characters are absolutely brilliant. But if you asked me to tell you what the world itself was about, I could not tell you.

The overall plot of The Collarbound is not anything special. It jumps between being so-so, to being pretty obvious and then quite good in places. The highlight of this book is in its characters, and that is where Zahabi shines. Both Tatters and Isha are wonderful to read, and I’ll be looking out for book two because I want to continue their story. I just hope that Zahabi stops being so evasive with her storytelling and starts to give actual answers. One book scattered with hints and discussed theories aimed at gently pointing the reader in a direction is enough for me.

The magic of The Collarbound is another point in its favour. Unlike the usual elemental magic favoured by most fantasy authors, Zahabi has chosen mind magic, and it is a refreshing change of pace. Magical duels take place inside the mind, where anyone can become anything they wish, where emotions and memories can be used as weapons. These scenes were wonderful to read and very well fleshed out.

In comparison, everything about the world the characters existed in was very wishy-washy, and it’s a shame because otherwise The Collarbound wouldn’t have been just an interesting novel; it could have been a great one. There are these creatures called the lightborn that Tatters describes as a moving ray of light that the Temple worships as gods, yet no context is given as to why they are worshipped or what exactly the lightborns are. The lightborn appear to be very important to the priests and the mages, yet nothing concrete is ever said about them. Likewise, there is a division between the priests and the mages, with them only coming together for a festival. Again, there is no explanation as to why the two organisations are so divided or when this division happened.

Then there are the Khers, and I’ll be honest, the lack of solid description and background offered about them confuses me the most. The kher are the subjugated people of The Collarbound; they are treated like animals, and by that I mean quite literally (they butcher them like animals). They are considered less than human due to their appearance, which appears to be human-like with red skin and large curling horns protruding from the sides of their heads. The humans refer to them as cow people, whether this is due to the colour of their skin and their horns or other cow-like features, I do not know, because the descriptions are vague.

Zahabi uses the kher to interrogate themes of difference, race and the other in society. The Kher have their own customs and their own language, which they rarely share with outsiders, not because they are unwilling to do so but because people don’t want to be associated with them. As the saying goes, people are afraid of what is different, and in The Collarbound, Zahabi drives the point home by imbuing the kher with a natural power that makes humans afraid of them. They are naturally immune to mind magic. Their horns are used as armour against magic, and there is a very disturbing scene in the book (see content warnings for details) that shows just how far people will go when there is nothing to stop them.

Despite these dark scenes, the kher are a community full of life and family. The scenes of their community were some of my favourite scenes, and unlike the rest of the world-building of The Collarbound, the Kher community and related mythology were very well written. Yet there was no explanation as to how the kher came to be subjugated by humans. It is very briefly mentioned, in relation to something else, that the kher used to be nomads, and that is the only background we get to the kher. How they came to be a ghetto community, separated from humans, is never explained.

The Collarbound ends very abruptly. One moment, two characters are having a conversation, I turned the page expecting something to happen and found myself at the end of the book. On GoodReads, the synopsis states that The Collarbound has “lyrical, character-driven writing as found in” A Darker Shade of Magic, and I’m sorry to say that is very wishful thinking. While it does have characters as charismatic as V.E Schwab’s series, lyrical is a bit of a stretch and in my opinion, the world-building needs a lot of work before it can truly be compared to the Shades of Magic series. What made Schwab’s series so good was the connection between fantastic characters and mesmerising world-building. The whole concept of a society where the people with magic are the ones in power is something that is beginning to be a little overdone now, and without something specific to make it memorable, it just feels like the same old record. Maybe that’s enough for some people; for me, it isn’t.

The rebels on the other side of the Shadowpass are massing, and refugees are flooding in to the city. Scared, penniless and not exactly welcome, they are desperate for the protection of the Nest, and the powerful mages who live there. But there is dissension in the Nest's ranks, and there is always someone willing to make money from the fearful.

The mages believe they have a secret weapon - a captured lightborn, kept prisoner by a magical slave collar and forced to do their bidding. But Tatters and Isha, tentative friends despite their suspicion of each other's motives, know something the mages do not.

The rebels are aware of the lightborn. They know how to deal with it. And they are ready for war...

This book was provided for free by NetGalley and the publishers in exchange for an honest review. Many thanks to the publisher and the author for the opportunity to read this book!

Content Warnings:

In the previous book, we were introduced to a world of magic, with mages ruling supreme over the ungifted and a non-human, horned race called the khers. The khers are treated like animals, relegated to a ghetto, and their bodies are harvested when they die, as their horns have magical properties. Most humans have little to do with the khers; however, Tatters, one of the main characters, is not most humans. He’s a collarbound, a mage enslaved with a magical collar that belonged to a long-dead race, although no one knows to whom he belongs. Eventually, we learned that’s because he belongs to the leader of The Renegades, Hawk, and escaped her clutches.

He’s been hiding safely in the city ever since. That was until a mage from his past turned up with a young woman sporting a hawk tattoo on her face. Isha was living a quiet life on a farm with her family until they were suddenly attacked one day without warning. Bit by bit, she unravels the mystery of the tattoo on her face, and realises that it was put there by her mother so that she would always be able to find her. Her mother is none other than Hawk.

By the end of The Collarbound, Tatters had also worked out Isha’s identity. He has spent time with her, introducing her to the kher community, and helped her settle in when she was a newcomer. In The Hawkling, as the situation with The Renegades starts to become more dire, the two of them are unsure whether they can trust each other, yet who else do they have to turn to?

While I enjoyed The Collarbound, I remember finding some of the descriptions and world-building lacking. They just didn’t feel as solid as they could be, and this was something I was mindful of when I started reading The Hawkling by Rebecca Zahabi. From the start, I noticed that Zahabi’s writing in The Hawkling felt much more confident. The stage had been set in the first book, the players were known, and now we could move onto the action – and boy, did we get into the action.

When I say action, I’m not talking about massive battles; that’s not this type of series. Zahabi has set up her fantasy world around magical duels that take place in the mind, and in The Hawkling, she builds upon the foundations she set up in book one. In The Collarbound, we mostly just saw apprentices duelling with Tatters in the inn, and this time we get to see how the Masters do it. The level of detail in those scenes is spectacular, and Zahabi skilfully brings these scenes to life as if you’re among the spectators watching the duel as it happens.

Everything is so much more refined in The Hawkling, and in a way, it makes me appreciate the way that The Collarbound was written. If Zahabi had given us more detail in the first book, I don’t think the reveals in this one would have had as much impact. Instead, we were left with clues, crumbs of information that simmered away until Zahabi was ready to light the spark in The Hawkling. For all the action, The Hawking is a very slow burn with everything coming to a stunning conclusion right at the end – just in time for a cliffhanger!

If The Collarbound interested you, but you weren’t quite sure about continuing this series, I would definitely suggest picking up The Hawkling, as the world and story that Zahabi is shaping is getting better and better. I’m really looking forward to the next book, The Lightborn.

Freed from his prison cell, the former slave known as Tatters is finally ready to face his past. Now his true nature is known to all, he can use his Lightborn powers freely. But they come at a price, and his loyalties remain conflicted. The renegades about to attack the city used to be his companions, and both sides have treated him badly. He will have to decide which side to choose.

Isha had thought Tatters was dead, and is overjoyed to see him return. But her master, one of the most powerful mages, has a past with them both, one which might make their reunion impossible. The mages remain divided, and in order to survive they will need to come together, and put aside past arguments. They too have a choice.

And outside the city, the renegades continue to advance. Destruction of the mages is their only goal, and nobody knows if they can be stopped...

Review to come in the future!

Thanks for reading my book reviews for the Tales from the Edge trilogy by Rebecca Zahabi!

Don’t forget to check out the rest of my reviews if you’re looking for some more book recommendations 🙂 You can also now sign up for my newsletter to get an email each month with a list of my new reviews!

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