Posted by This is a quick book! I put it on text-to-speech at 8 a.m. as I started to deep clean my house (I do a FALL cleaning instead of spring cleaning. Don’t judge me) and by noon it had completed.
This is a single pov story about a young woman trying to save her village and herself from Sorcerers who are bent on control. The Sorcerers are known to go from village to village seeking out those who can do magic. We aren’t sure why they want to take them until almost halfway through the book, but we know it’s nothing good. They also take any women they think are pretty regardless of whether they can do magic or not. When they come around looking for people sometimes they are able to get a little bit of a warning from the next village over and send out any magic users on long “fishing trips” so that they aren’t found.
Well, this can only be so effective for so long before things get dangerous for everyone. Isaree and some others from her village decide to go for a much longer trip to find somewhere safe to seek refuge. That’s not an easy task and along the way they are forced to make a hard decision, face certain death or imprisonment, or maybe try their hand and safely landing on The Wild Isles. Sorcerers won’t follow them there because the rocks surrounding the islands are not only dangerous, but they suck all the magic out of anyone who touches them, so most sorcerers wouldn’t dare take that chance. Isaree finds secrets on the islands that could help her people and she’s determined to try.
I liked Isaree, and that’s a good thing as we get the whole story from her perspective. If I didn’t enjoy her I would have set it down pretty early. She has a good head on her shoulders and is a pretty mature character. She’s also genuinely interested in making the world a better place for everyone and not just herself. She’s mindful not to become arrogant and an over-estimate of her own abilities despite being a magic user.
I liked the world building in this, it was fairly simple but engaging, relying on a lot of tried and true tropes and themes of classic epic fantasy. There’s a lot of loose magic without a magic system, there’s fireballs, healing magic, giants/giantesses, dragons and dragon riders, mention of “the ancient societies” and things along those lines.
The pacing was really, really fast. There’s only 208 pages according to Amazon, and so this actually could have used a little more meat to the story IMHO. However, there’s something to be said for a quick and easy book you can fly through in a day. Although I finished this and enjoyed my time with it, I do know that it won’t be a semifinalist and so it’s going to be a cut at this time. However, I’d recommend this perhaps to a YA audience who enjoys dragon riding.