The Last Born
By Ronke Ogunlola
Genre: Fantasy
Rating: L
Source: Advanced Review Copy
Grief is something that affects everyone at some point in their life. Everyone deals with it in their own way. But what happens when someone allows their grief to override all morality and restraint?
This is the tale of The Last Born.
In the world this author has created, life actually has a source: a waterfall. An order of witches draws upon its power to aid and benefit humanity.
There are four common types of witches: blood witches, life witches, elemental witches, and veil witches. But there is also a fifth and extraordinarily rare kind—the source witch—born only once every thousand years or so.
One of the last source witches, Abeni, suffers the loss of her son. As anyone would expect, she grieves. But in her grief, and in her anger over the way he died, she curses all life itself.
And so nothing new is born.
No animals. No plants. No human beings.
When the story truly begins, it has been eighteen years since this event, now known as the Stillness.
The story centers on Ori, a young woman who is part of a dance troupe. Ori demonstrates magical abilities that no one has ever seen before, and suddenly everyone wants her because they believe she may be able to reverse the Stillness.
The story follows everything that happens to Ori as she begins to fulfill her destiny.
Many of you will remember that I typically spoil all book summaries—except when the book is an advance review copy and has not yet been published. For that reason, I’m going to stop the synopsis here.
Bluestocking’s Learned Opinion
This was a great book.
I was hooked within the first couple of pages, and I tore through it pretty quickly. Honestly, I would have finished it much sooner if I hadn’t spent so much time stopping to take notes as I went.
Because the book has not yet been published, I’m not going to go into great detail about my thoughts. I want to give people a chance to experience the story for themselves.
What I will say is that this book has already inspired me to write several literary essays, because there are so many themes running through it.
The biggest one, at least for me, is that Ori’s journey is very clearly a hero’s journey.
Now, this is the first book in a series, so obviously Ori’s hero’s journey is going to continue over the course of the series. That means this is something I’ll probably keep revisiting and updating as future books are released.
But what I can tell you now is that this book is very well written, and I just loved it.
This is the first advance review copy I’ve received in quite some time, and boy, was it nice to get back into the saddle with this particular book.
One of the things I especially appreciated was that Ori is eighteen years old and is treated like an adult. We don’t have to deal with the familiar situation where a child protagonist is given information in tiny dribs and drabs because the adults around them are constantly deciding that they’re “not ready” to know what’s going on.
Ori has questions.
She gets answers.
There are still plenty of mysteries, of course, but the story doesn’t artificially drag things out by withholding basic information from her. Honestly, this could have been a much longer journey if the author had chosen to structure it that way, but instead the story moves very efficiently, and I really appreciated that.
I had a lot of theories while I was reading.
Some of them were right.
Some of them were very wrong.
And that was part of the fun.
I’m looking forward to writing more about the hero’s journey, as well as doing some character analysis and digging into some of the other themes I noticed once readers have had a chance to actually read the book.
But for now, I’ll just say this:
This is absolutely one you should get.
The Lastborn will be released on November 18, which also happens to be the author’s birthday.
And I am already eagerly waiting for book two.
