IF GOD WON’T SAVE YOU I WILL

inej ghafa is such an incredibly refreshing character to see in ya literature today.

obviously she's badass, she can fight, she wields knives, but she's never reduced to being the love interest in the story. her character development has, quite frankly, nothing to do with romance and it's mentioned several times that she will not try and heal kaz just to be with him.

she acknowledges that both of them have demons to face and struggles to overcome but she accepts that she cannot force a person to become someone else, no matter how much you might want to. she lets kaz decide for himself that he wants to become better for her, and she refuses to settle for less than she deserves.

i'm a sucker for characters healing together but i love this. they heal together but their journey is never wholly dependent on the other. they also accept that they have different goals in life, that they don't always have to be together to grow. it's realistic, and almost never seen in fantasy (or ya lit in general) where so many plots involve the bad boy™️ being "tamed" (for lack of a better word) by the girl.

The relationship Inej shares with her parents is so, so important to me. Not many YA books talk of the beauty of acceptance and support from a family and celebrates that love, which Inej’s parents do, for each other and their children. That’s just one reason though; found family is just as celebratory. 

More than that, Inej as a Suli girl, who is brown and an acrobat, severs many lines of linear and stereotypical thinking. Often brown cultures, with regard to parenting across continents, are thought of as very narrow or close minded, toxic, abusive, neglectful and outright and the blame is so heavily put on the fact that these families are brown. People from these families are not held responsible; their brownness is held responsible. The cultures are used to justify that, as if such trauma were a commonplace experience in these families. If people of other cultures themselves can so plainly mention it and say parenting is just like that if people hail from these communities, imagine how much this line of thought is ingrained into children from within these cultures.

Walking into the book, I was half expecting the painful, far from her family or consistent disagreements that Inej might have been subjected to. This comes in addition to the fact that YA books often loosely mention families, rarely address the impact they have on children. 

So the enormous joy of seeing such a healthy relationship between Inej’s parents, of such understanding and warmth between the morals, values and wisdom Inej holds with significance and the sort of respect she has for her parents is so deeply important to me. Not just because it breaks the aforementioned perspective, but also because it reinforces a positive influence and importance that families can have on characters. Something that YA books tend to not explore enough. It also implores you to think about healthy, established relationships and how else you could view them, no matter how minimal information canon provides about that.

you put it better. that’s exactly what i wanted to articulate.