Thank you to Delacorte Press for providing me with an early copy of this beautiful book! All opinions are my own.
I’M GOING TO TRY TO KEEP THIS AS NON-SPOILERY AS I CAN. FAIR WARNING.
I absolutely loved Kiersten White’s Illusions of Fate, Mind Games and Perfect Lies so naturally, I was eager to get my hands on this book. In contrast to her or works that I have read, this book is considerably longer and my mind said that this is either going to be a great thing or a really bad thing in terms of the storytelling. I am glad to say that this was a wonderful thing! This book was so crazy good. It had some really interesting aspects that I have never read before in a fantasy novel and I highly recommend this book to everyone. Like with Amy Tintera’s new book, Kiersten White takes her writing to a whole other level with this high fantasy venture that was simply not present in her sci-fi works.
One thing that I found really interesting was the questions raised about what freedom truly is. Lads, our lead character,is so convinced that she knows what she wants out of her life and is determined to stay on her path no matter what. However, she meets some other women in her travels that make her see that sometimes freedom comes at a cost to those who you wish to protect or fight for. I also really enjoyed the relationship between Lada Mehmed and how she grew into someone who could be ferocious but also have connections that go deeper than those of gain. I also enjoyed out main cast of characters and how they grew with each other as they learned more about themselves. I especially liked, as I said before, Lada being able to open up and trust others, shown with some of her soldiers as well in the last third of the book.
I also really enjoyed how short the chapters were. They kept the story moving at a wonderful pace and kept me intrigued and interested to get to the next Lada or Radu chapter. I also thought it was interesting how fast time moved in this novel. In the turn of one page, it was nearly a decade later sometimes. The political intrigue and the unflinching nature in which some of the customs of ancient kingdoms were described also intrigued me and kept me thinking about this book every time I put it down.
All in all, I really enjoyed this and I will definitley be picking up the rest of the series because that cliffhanger man, that cliffhanger.
You should definitely pick this up on June 28th, 2016!
Thank you again to Delacorte Press for sending me an early copy!
Happy Reading!
-Ashley (:
professionalreader 