Review: Crier's War

A stunning debut from Nina Varela, Crier’s War is full of political intrigue, vibrant worldbuilding, and a slow-burn romance for the ages. Following the lives of Ayla and Crier, two girls on different sides of a species war, this book revives the rebel girl trope and amps it to levels of honesty and complexity YA rarely touches on. 

After the War of Kinds ravaged the kingdom of Rabu, the Automae, designed to be the playthings of royals, usurped their owners’ estates and bent the human race to their will. Now Ayla, a human servant rising in the ranks at the House of the Sovereign, dreams of avenging her family’s death…by killing the sovereign’s daughter, Lady Crier. Crier was Made to be beautiful, flawless, and to carry on her father’s legacy. But that was before her betrothal to the enigmatic Scyre Kinok, before she discovered her father isn’t the benevolent king she once admired, and most importantly, before she met Ayla. Now, with growing human unrest across the land, pressures from a foreign queen, and an evil new leader on the rise, Crier and Ayla find there may be only one path to love: war.

Crier’s War is known on BookTok for its enemy-to-lovers content, which is honestly somewhere near number five on the list of the best things about this book, behind its premise, writing, worldbuilding, and representation. 

Nina Varela thinks vividly and writes small, building tone and setting word by word to create one of the richest atmospheres I’ve seen in recent YA sff works. Varela puts actual effort into helping the reader understand the historical events that contextualize the political situation, and the book takes its time to set the world up before really diving deep into the issues that plague Ayla. 

Ayla’s an interesting character, mainly because her traits subvert the rebel girl trope that was so prevalent in the mid-2010s. The reason I found myself drawn to her so much is thanks to the way the narrative treats her. It doesn’t assume we’re going to sympathize with Ayla because of her trauma and instead takes the issues she faces and dives deep into their real impacts on how she acts and who she wants to be. The stakes are therefore actually developed and not just assumed to be understood/felt. Varela doesn’t want you to agree, she wants you to feel what Ayla feels, and it works. I understood her fear whenever interacting with Automae, her hatred for the king, and her desperation to do something in the name of revenge. 

The only thing about Ayla that felt off was her snappiness. She sure got lucky she survived, talking back the way she did when we see so many other humans get attacked/killed literally just for breathing around Automa. It makes sense for her character in some ways, but most times all I could think was, “she’s smarter than this.”

Crier is also a character that grew on me, though she took time for me. This has less to do with the writing and more to do that I read her as asexual, so when she had her sexual awakening (courtesy of Ayla), I had to detangle that expectation. Regardless, Crier’s story is its own metaphor for queerness in a heteronormative society, giving us a refreshing take on a queer story without ever touching on queerphobia itself. The book has countless casual references to various queer couples, and Crier’s attraction to Ayla isn’t condemned because Ayla’s a girl but because Crier, an Automa, isn’t supposed to be feeling attraction at all. For nearly the entire book, she believes this to be a Flaw, something that can be used against her. But near the end of the book, when she goes to secretly get this Flaw fixed, both Crier and the reader learn there is no flaw. Crier doesn’t have something extra in her that makes her this way—it’s just her. 

Varela’s work is still gritty, complex, and extremely heavy, but not because of the queer characters or themes. It’s a dark queer story that separates the queerness from the darkness in ways that are satisfying and refreshing. 

Nina Varela was born in New Orleans and raised in Durham, North Carolina, where she spent most of her childhood running around in the woods. These days, Nina lives in Los Angeles with her tiny, ill-behaved dog. She writes stories about queer kids, magic, and the magic of queer kids. She is the author of the Crier’s War duology and the upcoming Juniper Harvey and the Vanishing Kingdom (February 2023). 

You can learn more about Varela on her website, https://www.ninavarela.com/.