For readers of The Poppy War, She Who Became the Sun, and The Will of the Many, a river-forged epic about a dispossessed heir who can command the currents. Esi Mensah's life has been carved by flood and fire. Every village she has tried to call home lies somewhere behind her, drowned or burned for its allegiance. As the daughter of the Drowned Regent of Nyemfa, she was raised to defend a throne built on sandbars and prayer. When her kin are slaughtered by the Empire of Red Salt, everything changes. Gifted with nsu-lume, the riverlight that bends water and memory, Esi becomes a prize even her enemies covet, especially in Khir-Atar, the terraced university-city ruled by scholars and war-priests. Disguised as a scribe, she enters their martial academy of oared banners and ink-bound oaths to unmake the empire from within.
To survive, Esi studies under the Reed Monks of Umen and fights through trials on the Nine Weirs, ladder-duels over thunderfalls, and debates that cut deeper than blades. Winning demands that she harness the silt-dark within her, the part that would drown a world to raise her dead. Yet the higher she climbs, the more the archives unmoor the stories she swore by. With war gathering between dunes and deltas and a new glass-borne sorcery that drinks sound spreading like drought, Esi must choose between vengeance that will empty the river and a salvation that could remake it.
Themes circle vengeance versus repair, with water as both weapon and witness. The book keeps worrying the line between memory and myth, asking what it means to defend a legacy "built on sandbars and prayer" when the flood keeps rewriting the shore.
I admired the moral tug-of-war more than I loved the resolution of it, but the questions linger like silt.
The worldbuilding gleams: terraced Khir-Atar, oared banners on canals, ink-bound oaths, and a glass sorcery that sips sound until the city feels hushed. Yet the glossary-level density sometimes muddies spatial stakes, and a clearer map of the Nine Weirs would help newcomers track the climb.
Esi is prickly, proud, and desperately loyal, and the nsu-lume twist of memory lets her grief argue back.
Her mentorship under the Reed Monks complicates an already thorny sense of duty. Dialogues in the academy cut with a scholar's precision, and you can feel how every victory costs her a piece of who she thought she was.
The prose moves like water, lyrical without smearing the action, though the diction occasionally lapses into self-mythologizing. Structurally the academy thread is braided with archive excerpts and debate scenes, a pattern that gives momentum but also repeats its cadence until the middle sags; when the Nine Weirs trials arrive, the variation snaps the book awake.
River-run intrigue and bruising trials carry Esi through Khir-Atar with propulsive clarity. A dense middle eddies, but the Nine Weirs and debate duels surge back to a sharp finish.
