Sapphires Flight by KS Villoso

This is a very character driven fantasy and it was refreshing to see POV’s that weren’t from characters that are well off and part of the upper class, but rather the common people who usually make up side characters in the story. I love side characters and sometimes I get bored reading about the hero over and over, yeah it’s cool to see how the hero saves the world and what not, but I often want something different – I love getting to see the medic’s point of view, or the washer woman, or the squire, it makes the world feel more real and relatable and this book series did an amazing job. K.S. Villoso’s strength is character development and world development. This world is immense and there are a ton of characters, I often liken it to ASOIAF with the amount of characters and level of plot going on and I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that. There was a huge amount of build up in the first two books which are shorter that leads up to this epic door stopping tome of awesome. In the first book you may be a bit confused at first what’s going on but it does come together in the last third of the book and I believe it to be intentional, this book though isn’t like that, you know what’s going on and it’s the culmination of everything that’s come before it. It was so satisfying to see how everything came to a head, how the characters had to live with what they’ve done. There’s so much going on, kingdoms are going down, the characters are growing and changing, so much shit is happening it was an awesome read.

And the twists! Man do I like unexpected shit, and there were a few things in here where I was like “ohhh shit!”.

It’s always hard for me to write reviews for books farther along in the series because I want to give examples of awesome, but most of those are spoilers. Womp womp.

Just trust me when I say if you like the first book, DO read on throughout the series. This is an example kind of like Michael J Sullivan where the writing gets stronger with each book and the third book is far and away my favorite, 5 stars well deserved for complexity, character development, and world building. I thoroughly enjoyed the main characters growth and development and the way the plot all came together for one epic story. This series deserves more attention than it’s getting and I’ll def check out anything else this author puts out.

And that cover art though, hot damn!