This is my third Tricia Levenseller book and I fall in love with her as a writer every time. This might not be my favourite so far but I love them all so much and for so many different reasons.
I love this book for so many reasons but some key ones were the relationships between the different characters, the anxiety representation in this that you don’t normally see in fantasy books and the conversations/banter between the characters.
This book follows Ziva who is on the run from a dangerous warlord with her sister Temra, a mercenary Kellyn and scholar Petrik and together they have to do a lot of travelling, so I wouldn’t recommend this book if you don’t like books with lots of travelling and moving because that is a high majority of this book.
As I already mentioned one of the key things I loved in this book was the relationships that these four characters shared.
First off the sister one between Ziva and Temra, I’ve got two sisters so I love reading about sisters and what was interesting about these two, in particular, is the fact that they ended up being so different and clashed so much during this book but were still so close it doesn’t make sense except when I think about my sisters and me it does and I don’t know how to explain it. The conflict that they have is very reasonable and real, you can understand where both sisters are coming from but accompanying the closeness that they continue to share it feels like the bond I share with my sisters.
Then you have Ziva and Kellyn which is interesting throughout the book because I love them and they are great together as a pair but because of how much Ziva wants to protect Temra it does have some negative effects on the two of them as friends first and foremost due to the fact that they have different ideas on what they think should be done. Spoilers about this here on Goodreads.
This then directly correlates with my thoughts about the characters. I would probably say that Temra is my least favourite character and whilst I didn’t have any issues with her, I am an older sister so I could really resonate with Ziva’s view of some of her actions. I also think that both sisters had a few flaws which are completely reasonable but even though they’re sisters have been through a lot together and have these flaws Temra said some things, knowing Ziva and how it would affect her that were hurtful and I don’t think she really should have. On the other end of the stick, I could extremely relate to Ziva on so many different levels, because she’s an older sister, because of her anxiety and her uncertainty towards romance as well but she was extremely overprotective of Temra and did some things because of that, that was almost certainly destined to harm others. You then had the mercenary Kellyn who I think is definitely one of my favourite if not my favourite character of the group because he cared so much for Ziva, his family and others who mean a lot to him as well as not giving up on people easily. Even with this being the case and doing as much as he could to save them he wouldn’t directly put others in harm if he could avoid it and knew how best to tackle things. Something that was also amazing was his banter with Petrik. And then you do have Petrik himself who was a great character, he didn’t care about what was going on he just cared for these girls and wanted to learn about magic to try and help magic users and when relocations did come out about him, he didn’t deny them but it didn’t change who he was.
The last thing that I really enjoyed about this book was the anxiety representation. It was something that I connected to some much and helped me feel so seen as someone who can struggle a lot with anxiety but as well it feels like it’s something rarely seen in fantasy books. There is frequent mental health rep in contemporary stories whether that be romance, contemporary or another sub aspect of it but you don’t see it as much in fantasy or books that basically aren’t set in our contemporary world but what about the people who read almost exclusively to those genres, they should still be able to see themselves, everyone should be able to see themselves in any genre because almost all books are still based on people even if they’re slightly different to us and people still struggle with mental health, can be disabled, a different race or stand out for a different reason.
Overall I did really enjoy this book and look forward to reading the next one in the series, highly recommend it.
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