Today’s Women in SF&F Month guest is Sara Hashem! Her Egyptian-inspired epic fantasy debut novel, The Jasad Heir, was a Sunday Times bestseller and a Goodreads Choice Award nominee in the Romantasy category. Her next novel and the conclusion to her Scorched Throne duology, The Jasad Crown, will be released on July 15. I’m very excited for its release since her first novel was one of my favorite books of 2023 with its excellent banter and character dynamics, including an enemies-to-maybe-something-more arc done incredibly well. But most of all, I loved how she crafted her protagonist and her voice, so I am thrilled she is here today to share more about writing Sylvia in “Along for the Ride: A Head Worth Inhabiting.”

About The Jasad Heir:

A fugitive queen strikes a bargain with her greatest enemy that could resurrect her scorched kingdom or leave it in ashes forever in this unmissable, slow-burn, Egyptian-inspired epic fantasy debut. 

Ten years ago, the kingdom of Jasad burned. Its magic was outlawed. Its royal family murdered. At least, that’s what Sylvia wants people to believe. The Heir of Jasad escaped the massacre, and she intends to stay hidden, especially from the armies of Nizahl that continue to hunt her people.

But a moment of anger changes everything. When Arin, the Nizahl Heir, tracks a group of Jasadi rebels to her village, Sylvia accidentally reveals her magic—and captures his attention. Now Sylvia’s forced to make a deal with her greatest enemy: Help him hunt the rebels in exchange for her life.

A deadly game begins. Sylvia can’t let Arin discover her identity, even as hatred shifts into something more between the Heirs. And as the tides change around her, Sylvia will have to choose between the life she wants and the one she abandoned.

The scorched kingdom is rising, and it needs a queen.

Along for the Ride: A Head Worth Inhabiting

When I set out to write The Jasad Heir, the term “unlikeable female character” wasn’t one I had come across yet, but unbeknown to me, I had started crafting a character that would fit neatly into that strange, amorphous, slightly troubling category. Sylvia, the protagonist of The Jasad Heir, survived a massacre that killed her royal grandparents and lives in hiding following a siege that burned her kingdom to the ground.

At the time, I thought nothing could be worse for a female main character than to be disliked. I had fabricated a law of balance in my head: if she’s fierce, if she undertakes a harrowing and dangerous journey, if she strikes a deal with the devil, it must always be on behalf of someone else. If she’s sassy, she must also be soft-hearted. If she’s calculating, it has to be as a last resort. Her own self-preservation can never be important enough to warrant the risk of taking an action that could render her “unlikeable.” If, for any reason, she encounters a situation where she chooses to put herself first, then she has to feel absolutely terrible about it.

By trying to make the initial version of Sylvia palatable, I had accidentally made her insufferable. This Sylvia didn’t take ownership of her selfishness, she excused it. She didn’t embrace her capacity for violence, and she refused to look too closely at the dark lengths she was willing to go to ensure her own freedom. The law of balance I’d subconsciously forced onto Sylvia had built her into someone I didn’t understand, which I realized was a fate far worse than unlikeability.

Changing the way Sylvia viewed herself and her actions transformed my relationship with her character.

Let me introduce you to the real Sylvia of Jasad: she’s a temperamental, paranoid crook who’s terrible at keeping plants alive, and five years of surviving unspeakable torture by a disgraced war captain has caused Sylvia to distrust both her magic and her scorched throne. She’ll fake struggling to carry heavy objects so she doesn’t give away that she can kill you with one hand, she eats a tooth-rotting volume of sesame seed candies, and if you put her in a situation where she feels trapped, she’ll become utterly unhinged. Friendship? A weakness for your enemies to exploit. Honesty and integrity? Sweet nonsense we tell children before bed. She’s aware of her own flaws, and while she certainly doesn’t celebrate them, she doesn’t let others shame her for them, either. She struggles with her identity as a fugitive Heir and a Jasadi, and the trauma that shadows her life shows itself in how she views her place in the Scorched Throne world. She is a reluctant hero whose reluctance is continually challenged by how she defines herself and how she defines what it means to be a hero.

Allowing Sylvia to lean into who she is made it so much more fun to inhabit her head, and I think the same can be said for many characters we don’t particularly agree with or ‘like.’ Bravery, kindness, compassion: no two people express these qualities the exact same way, so why should likeability for a female character follow one rigid set of rules?

Instead, I would ask: do you understand them? Does it make sense why they move through the world the way they do?

And most importantly, do you want to stick around for the ride?

Sara Hashem is the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Jasad Heir. An American-Egyptian writer from California, she spent many sunny days holed up indoors with a book. Sara’s love for fantasy and magical realms emerged during the two years her family lived in Egypt. When she isn’t busy naming stray cats in her neighborhood after her favorite authors, Sara can be found buried under coffee-ringed notebooks.