Book Review: How It All Began – Learning to Trust by Mara Blake

How It All Began: Learning to Trust – Omal Bè Hanni and Imrich Ebal is the third entry in Mara Blake’s How It All Began line, a set of illustrated backstories orbiting her long-running Star Lyathe series. It runs ninety-three pages, it is told entirely in first person, and it does something that shared-universe supplementary material almost never manages. It works completely on its own terms. You do not need to have read a single Star Lyathe novel to be undone by it.

The premise is simple enough to state in a sentence. Imrich Izon Osh, an orphan from the Bowan continent, tells you how he met Omal Bè Hanni Ebal. What that sentence conceals is that the meeting does not happen until roughly two-thirds of the way through the book, and that everything preceding it is an account of a childhood so systematically deprived that the eventual arrival of ordinary kindness reads as a genuine shock to the system. The reader’s system as much as the narrator’s.

It also conceals what the book is quietly building toward. The opening page tells us these two men become “warriors, pilots and Ambassadors.” The book we are holding is the argument for how that happened, and the answer it gives is not training, or destiny, or talent. The answer is that somebody fed him.

A narrator who talks to you

Blake makes an early structural decision that pays off for the entire length of the book. Imrich is not narrating to himself. He is narrating to you. He interrupts. He backtracks. He gets defensive. “You’re damn right I ran. You would have too. Ok, maybe not you. But I did.” He scolds the reader for forgetting things he told us forty pages ago (“Remember? Remember? All that new work?”) and then apologizes for the tone. He drops a bomb and immediately deflects with a joke.

This is a voice, not a device, and it is doing real psychological work. Imrich’s compulsive management of his listener is the same defensive reflex that runs his entire emotional life. He cannot let a vulnerable statement stand without hedging it. By the time he says, near the end, “Well, That’s what I thought … how I felt. Don’t judge me,” we have watched him do a version of that move fifty times, and it lands as characterization rather than tic.

The prose is spare and rhythmically confident. Blake writes in fragments and ellipses that mimic the halting cadence of someone telling a story he has never told out loud. It should be exhausting over ninety-three pages. It isn’t, because the fragmentation tightens and loosens with Imrich’s emotional state, clipped and staccato through the Bowa years, longer and more fluid once he crosses the gorge. The italics work the same way. They are not decorative emphasis. They mark the words Imrich cannot say evenly. A person! ME … and this life. Read aloud, the emphasis falls exactly where a real person’s voice would crack.

The Bowa chapters

The first half is bleak, and Blake refuses to soften it. Imrich watches his father killed at four, defending the Baaea’s right to autonomy of all things. His mother is killed at six, protecting a stranger. An accident, he says; they were aiming at the young woman she was shielding. He is left with two options, the gangs or the military, and he notes flatly that “neither option fed you … not very well, and not without a price.”

What elevates this above ordinary grimdark backstory is the specificity of the social observation. Blake has thought carefully about how a conscription state manufactures its own supply. “The more adults they killed or conscripted, the more orphans they created. And our numbers swelled.” She has thought about the shape of gang life for a child who ages out of it, how growing tall makes you visible among the little ones, and how visibility is the thing that kills you. And she has thought about how an occupying power weaponizes illiteracy. The Bowa post their new laws on village walls. The children being hunted under those laws cannot read them. Nine of Imrich’s old gang die before anyone works out what the signs say. That beat, delivered in four panels, is the sharpest political image in the book.

It also sets up the book’s real engine. Imrich learns to read from Elmirs, and Blake makes the brave choice of refusing to make Elmirs kind. She tells him outright that he is an “unworthy,” an orphan, one of the unwanted, and that teaching him is a duty and a way to raise her own standing by saving one of the discards. He knows this. He stays anyway, for almost five years, because the books are the only thing he has. Later he learns most of those pages were smuggled freedom-fighter literature from Baaea, and that Elmirs, who had never read them, had no idea what she was handing him. “Elmirs had always said that reading would make me strong. I guess she was right in more ways than one.”

The word unworthy runs through the whole book like a bruise he keeps pressing. Blake never lets him fully shake it. Not after the gorge, not after the clinic, not after the handfast. That restraint is the most honest thing in the book.

Simolie, the woman he shares a cave with for two years, is a smaller portrait but an equally unsentimental one. There is no romance and no villainy in it, just two people who don’t much like each other, staying because the alternative is being alone. When she throws him out, he is more embarrassed than hurt, and his own flatness about it disturbs him more than the betrayal does.

The Ebals

The turn comes when Imrich is caught by the Baaea underground and mistaken, in the dark, for Humasa Oweer’s son Philli. He gets hit twice before Vwilli Zeall stops it. Then the two men begin arguing about whether to kill him, and Blake writes the scene from the ground, from inside a young man pinned by his arms and legs, listening to strangers debate his life. His reaction is the finest single passage in the book. He realizes that being talked about as a person is a new experience. “They were talking about me, but like I was still a person. A person!” Later, they ask him where he lives, and he snaps back at them, and that flash of irritation is the first sign we get that there is a personality under all that survival.

Humasa and Vwilli are more than a plot mechanism. Humasa hits him because he loves his own son and has threatened that son with exactly this. He apologizes afterward, with grace. Vwilli hands over a water skin without being asked, notices the boy drains it, and starts asking questions. And it is Vwilli who asks the question the book has been building to for fifty pages: do you want to leave Bowa? Imrich, who has been called unworthy his entire life, is undone by the simple fact that someone bothered to ask him anything at all. He runs back for his bag of books and cries for the first time since his mother died.

Then the book pivots, and Omal Bè Hanni Ebal arrives, thrown off a pinal he is learning to ride, landing on Imrich’s feet. Imrich, characteristically, runs. Omal finds him two days later and brings him food.

What Blake gets exactly right about the Ebals is the asymmetry, and how it inverts everything you expect. Omal is the younger man, twenty-one to Imrich’s twenty-three, and he is also the wiser, steadier, more emotionally fluent one. He is a trained therapist working in a clinic, a natural giver, adored by everyone in Baaea, and he is quietly the more powerful person in the room at all times. The gap is never played for irony and never resolved by making Imrich catch up. It simply is the shape of them.

Blake also refuses to make Omal a saint, which is what saves the romance. He is only twenty-one. He has his own insecurities, and Imrich finds them and makes things worse. He has, in Imrich’s phrase, a “lethal temper.” He gets genuinely angry. He does not know what he is doing either, and in the book’s warmest and funniest beat, he admits it and laughs about it.

That admission comes attached to the sequence that is the emotional hinge of the entire book. Omal offers a drink from his water pouch. Imrich knows perfectly well what the gesture means. He has watched other men do it for years and has never once been on the receiving end. He drinks. And then Omal knocks his feet out from under him by cheerfully confessing he has never done this before and has no plan. “I didn’t know it then, but to think back … I think that was the moment I began to love him.” It is a small scene built from one object and one laugh, and it carries more weight than most novels manage in a chapter.

The courtship that follows is unhurried, awkward, and genuinely adult. Imrich’s damage does real damage. He accuses Omal of lying about his inexperience. He is rude at a dinner he was invited to and spends a page cataloguing his own stupidity. “Just cut out my tongue PLEASE!” He asks why me? so relentlessly that Omal eventually stops answering. He counts three separate occasions on which he nearly lost the relationship, and the book is careful to note that they did not make the formal declaration for nearly another year. In case you think they rushed stupidly into something, he tells us, they didn’t.

The exchange that seals it is four words long. Omal says You’re mine. Imrich, who has never in his life been claimed by anyone, hears the sentence correctly for once and answers: Then I guess that makes you mine. He tells us he had never heard those words before, never said them, and that it felt really, really good. Blake lets the moment stand without a single line of commentary, which is the right call.

The handfast is the emotional summit, and it is worth noting what Blake does with it. Imrich asks to become a family as his birthday gift, partly, and he knows it, because he has just learned that families get preference for the evacuation mission. He spends the rest of the book unable to prove to Omal that this wasn’t the reason. That small, unresolved guilt is a beautifully judged piece of character work. It keeps the wedding from being a bow on the package. And still, when the ceremony ends with both of them in tears, the caption underneath (“I think my life truly began on that day”) is fully earned.

Readers who know the wider Star Lyathe books will be aware that the Ebals’ story runs across several volumes, and that Blake has written companion material for them elsewhere, including a personal profile of Bè Hanni and Together: One Heart … One Life. What is striking is how little of that you need. Learning to Trust is a complete emotional arc: a man who was told he was worth nothing, learning slowly and badly that he is allowed to be loved. If it functions as an entry point to a five-book romance, it also stands as a finished piece of work on its own.

Blake earns her ending, too. When the Bowan fleet comes under Meitri Zol, whose spies and saboteurs have been inside the camp for years and who has destroyed nine ships already, the four surviving vessels launch. Imrich’s decision is not a decision at all. “I knew what choice I’d make … I had no choice … whatever Bè Hanni wanted to do.” And Omal, characteristically, has already read it in his face and made the call for both of them. The closing caption (“Because he wasn’t just the best thing in my life, he became my life”) would be sentimental somewhere else. Here it is the last line of a ninety-three-page argument, and it holds.

It should also be said plainly. This is a love story between two men, told without apology, without tragedy, and without a single page spent on anyone else’s opinion of it. Nobody in Baaea remarks on it. The obstacles are Imrich’s own history and nothing else. That is a rarer thing than it should be in the genre, and Blake handles it as though it were the most natural thing in the world, which, in her universe, it is.

The artwork

The visual construction is the reason to read this in its flipbook form, and it deserves detailed praise.

Blake builds each spread as a layered composite: foreground figures cut cleanly from their backgrounds, mid-ground photographic panels, and behind everything a large ghosted figure, usually Imrich himself, head in hands or turned away, bled almost to white. That ghost layer is the book’s signature move and it functions as a second narrator. While the caption text is busy deflecting, the washed-out giant behind it is grieving, and the two registers play against each other on nearly every page. It is a genuinely sophisticated piece of visual storytelling, and it does something a purely textual version of this story could not.

The palette is disciplined throughout: dust, ochre, bone, and deep black, warming perceptibly once the story crosses the gorge into Baaea. The Bowa chapters are all hard sun and dry ground. The Baaea chapters bring in river green, firelight, candle-warm interiors. It is a straightforward device, handled with restraint, and by the handfast spread (candles, bound wrists, a bowl of water, three figures in a dim room) the accumulated warmth genuinely moves.

Costume and colour also carry characterisation without a word of explanation. Imrich wears black almost continuously, from the cave years onward. Omal is in warm browns and creams. In the spreads after they meet, the two palettes begin sharing a frame, and by the closing pages Imrich is finally out of black. Nobody says a thing about it. You simply notice.

Panel architecture is varied and confident. Blake breaks her grids for emphasis: a full-bleed spread of conscription columns marching a red road, an unruled page of falling riders and panicking pinals for the accident, a page of Imrich’s face repeated in a ring as his self-image fractures. Small boxed captions are dropped at the foot of a page like a comedian’s tag line, and they are consistently the funniest and most devastating text in the book. “Ok, more than practically.” “Did I forget to mention Bè Hanni’s lethal temper?” “Truth? A lifetime later, I’m not much better.”

Special mention goes to the cartography. The two-continent map of Neania Bowa and the Baaea Territory, with its Poosin Sea, Fiaaa Gorge, Hoba Ebrie River, and the settlements of AuwRen, Oarsa, Gwantu Neri and Neus-Lit, is beautifully made and does real narrative work. When Imrich later walks east toward the free territories, we know exactly what that distance costs him. Worldbuilders should take notes.

A fair accounting

The book is not flawless. There are scattered typos and small slips of the kind a fresh proofing pass would catch, and on a handful of the busier spreads the intended reading order between adjacent caption boxes is momentarily ambiguous. The map’s place-name lettering is set small enough that it strains at flipbook resolution, which is a shame given how good the map is.

More substantively, readers arriving cold may be briefly disoriented by the framing. This is labelled Book 3 / Chapter 1 of the How It All Began line, and the Bowa/Baaea/Fiaaa political situation arrives in fragments as Imrich happens to think of it rather than laid out up front. It resolves quickly, and the drip-feed is arguably true to a narrator who only half-understood his own world, but a reader expecting an on-ramp will need a few pages of patience.

The narrative also leans hard on ellipses and italics. Used as Blake uses them, as breath marks in a nervous man’s speech, they work. Readers who prefer their prose punctuated conventionally will find the density high, particularly in the first twenty pages before the rhythm establishes itself.

None of this does real damage. These are surface issues on a book whose foundations are sound.

Rating: ★★★★½

Verdict: How It All Began – Learning to Trust is a small, fierce, beautifully assembled book about a man who was told he was worth nothing until somebody handed him a water pouch. Blake’s artwork is its own argument. The ghosted-figure layering, the warming palette, the costume shift nobody mentions: this is the work of an artist thinking hard about what images can carry that words can’t. Her narrator is one of the more convincing first-person voices we have encountered in indie SF this year, defensive, funny, self-sabotaging, and completely recognisable.

But the Ebals are the reason to read it. Omal and Imrich are that rare fictional couple who feel like they have an interior life independent of the plot they’re in: a younger man with more wisdom than he should have, an older one with less, both of them working it out badly and honestly and in public. The romance is patient, adult, and unashamed. The trauma is handled without wallowing. The politics are sharper than the page count suggests.

If you have never touched the Star Lyathe books, start here anyway. And if you have, this is the piece that explains why the Ebals matter.