Reviewed by Silvara on
I received this book for free from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
I was afraid I wouldn't like this as much as I did, because the 'girl pretending to be a boy and falling in love while proving she is as good as any boy' seemed to be hugely popular a few years ago. And I read a lot of them. But this book sucked me in from the first pages.
There is a lot of gore and some fairly icky descriptions of battle with monsters and descriptions of wounds gone bad. So I wouldn't suggest this for younger readers or those who are bothered by such things. However that said...
I really liked Sam, and I adored Braeden! I liked Tristan and the Uriel's leader. There wasn't a huge amount of world-building, but there was enough that you got a sense of how things fit together. And while it has the 'girl pretending to be a boy' plotline, it was anything but predictable. One of the boys finds out she's a girl fairly early on in the book, but it is not done in any way I've seen before. The bad guy was also a near total surprise to me, though I could see a bit of the foreshadowing of it once it was revealed.
Sam is headstrong and stubborn, she is also sometimes a bit of an idiot. Mostly because she doesn't often think before she acts or says things. Braeden is both dark, and a bit of a tragic hero. He tries so hard to do the right thing, but something always seems to go wrong.
This is not a love triangle. Though for close to half the book I was afraid it might end up being so. But one of the two possible loves was never actually in love with her, and she was never in love with him. And I'll leave it at that to avoid spoilers, you'll have to read it to find out who Sam picks.
I loved this book so much! And I'm thrilled to hear it is the first in at least a 2-book set. There are a number of questions left unanswered, and threads hanging that I want to know what happens with. The war, the trip across the sea, if Sam's relationship with her father changes like it looked like it might towards the end of this first book.
If you want a story that will suck you in and make you read every page, with a slow-build romance that you can actually see growing, as well as plenty of action and characters that are highly developed, you need to read this book.
This review was originally posted on Fantasy of the Silver Dragon
Reading updates
- Started reading
- 1 June, 2015: Finished reading
- 1 June, 2015: Reviewed