Proceeds from all sales fund future publications. Leaving Rue may be tough, but I look forward to what J. This is a thoroughly engaging story and a compelling resolution to Rue’s journey. Danger lurks around every corner, and Rue has to overcome multiple obstacles in her journey. It’s the story of love, loss, forgiveness, and embracing your identity.Īshes of Gold burns through the pages with a relentless storyline that doesn’t give readers time to breathe. For me, the story worked, and it isn’t just the story of Rue’s redemption. I won’t elaborate more on that because I don’t want to include spoilers. I think she had to go through what she did to be able to make the choices she made in the end. She has to figure out who to trust, and that’s a hard thing to do when there are people (literally) around every corner trying to destroy you. She can’t hop back to East Row and abandon Ghizon. She’s also lost everyone she would normally rely on. People go to war and come back broken, and Rue’s still living in a war, hasn’t really had time to grieve for over the deaths of her moms and dad, and people are looking to her to make things right.

Feeling responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people is a heavy burden to bear, no matter how strong you are. She’s plagued by uncertainty as she picks up the pieces from her failure to defend her people and tries to recover her memory, and that’s relatable. Rue struggles early on, and it’s natural under the circumstances. It was much harder turning that last page and letting her go. Ashes of Gold picks up a few months after Wings of Ebony left off, but it was easy to fall back into step with Rue. A river of magic carries the words and the story as Rue/Jelani fights to save her people. Elle’s second novel in The Wings of Ebony duology. She also wrote its sequel, Ashes of Gold. magazine calls it the debut fantasy we need right now. Darkness isn’t the only intoxicating melody in J. Elle is the author of the instant New York Times and Indie bestseller Wings of Ebony, a YA novel about a Black teen who must lean into her ancestor’s magic to protect her inner-city community from drugs, violence, and crime.

J elle ashes of gold