The Raybearers react to problems and try to appease everyone. When Tar and Dayo assume the throne as equal partners in Redemptor, they want to fix what is so obviously broken. Rebuilding and creating new legislation isn’t as dramatic as the revolution, but is just as important. It doesn’t take a majority, but it does take a groundswell.Ī lot of fantasy series end with a revolution successfully deposing the despot few dig into what happens next. Dismantling an oppressive system requires the work of communities, the shared labor of those who were oppressed and those who did the oppressing.

No one person can make up for an empire’s worth of capitalist violence. This is not something that can be done alone, no matter what she thinks. Tarisai must carry the weight of her empire’s past sins as she figures out her place in the present and plots a course toward the future. She is also Aritsar’s attempt at redemption, their hope for progress, and their act of repentance. She is a Redemptor, with a map of the Underworld glowing on her skin. The title of the second book in Ifueko’s duology has a dual meaning.

Tarisai must decide whether to defend the status quo as she was taught or risk everything to fight for something better. Meanwhile, a masked activist calling himself the Crocodile is riling up peasants and miners across the empire and trying to overthrow the new rulers. They taunt Tar with hateful words and terrorize anyone who resists her rule. Ojiji, spirits of Redemptor children who failed to escape the Underworld, begin haunting Aritsar. The Abiku (monstrous creatures who inhabit the Underworld) agreed to stop taking Songlanders as Redemptors (children sent to the Underworld as sacrifices) in exchange for Tarisai becoming a Redemptor, but no deal with the Abiku is without its loopholes and tricks. As the newly anointed Empress, she reigns alongside Dayo, now the Emperor of Aritsar. Redemptor, the second book in Jordan Ifueko’s young adult fantasy duology, begins not long after the events of Raybearer. The truths about her mother, the emperor, and the empire itself were tangled up in her own murky past, and exposing those secrets cracked the foundations of her homeland. To save the boy she loved like a brother, she set out on a journey across the vast Aritsar empire. She was sent to the imperial palace after being cursed by her mother to become one of the Crown Prince’s trusted Council of 11 and then kill him. Tarisai was raised in a secret estate, cut off from the world by her enigmatic and largely absent mother, a woman known only as The Lady. Now at 17, she is Tarisai Idajo, Empress Redemptor, the ruler who was never supposed to exist. Redemptor, Jordan Ifueko ( Abrams 978-4-2, 336pp, $18.99, hc) August 2021.Īt 11 years old, she was Tarisai of Swana, a lonely girl who was desperate to be loved.

Raybearer by Jordan Ifueko