Cast in Shadow (The Chronicles of Elantra, #1)

by Michelle Sagara

[Chelsea]

This book probably should only have 4 out of 5 stars because of a few things I’ll mention in a bit, but I enjoyed the story so much I bumped it up to 5.

The things I didn’t like about this book are (1) it’s really complicated, (2) it’s really confusing, and (3) there wasn’t a whole lot of character development. BUT the good things were so entertaining that I sorted of just ignore all the bad things. The book was really, really confusing. The character doesn’t know all that much about what’s going on so we’re in the dark with her. But I did kind of like gradually finding out things as she did, even when they didn’t make sense to me. There’s a lot happening in this book. First of all, there’s a lot of races. There’s bird people, elvish people, humans, tentacle people, magic people, cat people, dragon people, the list goes on forever. I guess technically it’s just a lot of shapeshifters but it gets confusing remembering what every one can do. I kind of like learning about all these races though. It’s something new and fresh that we don’t see very often. I know pretty much all the myths about vampires but not a lot about these shapeshifting creatures.

The only character development I found was with the main character Kaylin, and she didn’t even change that much. Yet. I found that this book hints that she will change in the future, it’s just going to be really slow. For everyone else we don’t know a lot about them but I think we’re going to learn things a little bit at a time. While all the character things were slow, the plot wasn’t. There was lots of action and mystery to keep you busy and distracted from not knowing anything. Also there wasn’t a love triangle in this book! I’m very impressed about that. There was no romance at all really but I think there’s going to be in the future. There’s some hints at it!

Even though it seems like I’m giving it a really bad review, I found I really enjoyed reading this book and didn’t want to put it down. To me, that’s more important than all the technical things. The most important is the writing in general and I liked the writing style of this author. I’m looking forward to reading more.