From Blood and Ash

From Blood and Ash is the first novel of Jennifer L. Armentrout's Blood and Ash series, published in 2020. Its narrator is Penellaphe Balfour, known to almost everyone as Poppy, who was chosen at birth to be the Maiden of her kingdom and raised to be presented to the gods at an event called the Ascension. Everything about her life is arranged around that day.

The title carries rules rather than privileges. As the Maiden, Poppy is not to be touched, looked at or spoken to, and she has never been allowed to choose what comes next. What she would rather do is train with the guards and fight the creatures that killed her family, and her position keeps her behind glass while everyone else is allowed to live.

Into that arrangement comes Hawke Flynn, a guard assigned to protect her until the Ascension. He treats her as a person rather than a symbol, which is not how anyone else in her life behaves, and the kingdom's rules about who may approach the Maiden stop holding soon after he arrives. Poppy's training also puts her in front of the things the royal court is supposed to be defending against, and her guard's willingness to be honest with her is what starts to separate him from the rest.

Armentrout built the series around a kingdom with a rigid religious hierarchy, a court with secrets and a heroine whose questions about both grow more dangerous the more answers she gets. A Kingdom of Flesh and Fire followed in 2020 and The Crown of Gilded Bones in 2021, and the sequence later became part of a larger set of connected series with their own leads.