Posted by This book is a doorstopping classic epic fantasy that many people crave. If you want to read about elves, dwarves, crazy shadow creatures, ancient kings, lost relics, mages inhabiting creatures, etc., then this book may be for you!
Kate is our MC and the book opens with her and her brothers getting chased through a cave system after they find a mysterious box. Kate is only just coming into her powers at 12 years old, and she’s so new to her magic that she doesn’t even know it’s magic. She’s able to “smell” people’s personalities, so much so she can smell when they’re closer to her before she’s able to see them. She later finds out these are called remnants and that everyone has a specific remnant unique to them, like a fingerprint. However, in these early days she has no idea why her brother smells like pine trees, and her other one smells like desert wind, and that the people who are chasing her smell rotten and foul. All she really knows is that someone really wants her magic box and they’ll do anything to get it. Well, they do manage to take the box… and one of her brothers.
We skip forward 20 years to the present and she’s still looking for her missing brother. She’s become an academic of sorts, someone called a Keeper, who is more or less a very well respected historian who can use magic. Her brother Bo, who was not captured 20 years ago, is off exploring the country looking for clues and sending back interesting artefacts from digs and his explorations.
Well, something goes wrong. An elf shows up, grumpy as fuck mind you, to the Keeper’s gates (which isn’t supposed to be possible) and is like, “Bo told me to give you this box” and then starts to leave. Naturally, Kate is like, wtf, where did you come from, where is my brother, why do you now have this box? The elf, Venn, really wants nothing to do with Kate and just wants to go home, back to the woods. Kate can’t just let it go because her brother’s letters are getting fewer and further between and could hint at danger since this box shows up without Bo right after he’s talking about shadow creatures.
So, one thing leads to another and off they set on an adventure to go find her brother, figure out wtf this box does, and what this mysterious “shadow” is that her brother was referring to in his letters. Along this journey there’s a ton of character development done as we meet more characters, like a pair of dwarven brothers, and more dynamics and world building come into play.
Despite being a long story the focus really stays on just a few characters, and with the amount of page time they all get, there’s a lot of really strong development. I think I liked Venn the most just because I like cranky characters. She’s got a lot going on in her backstory and we get to know more about her towards the end of the book as we meet her betrothed — we aren’t sure why they’re on bad terms at first but when I did figure it out I was like, giirrllll, I’d be pissed, too. Kate is an easy character to root for, she tries her best to do well by others, she’s got an innate need to get to the answers behind mysteries, and she’s dedicated to helping her family. All in all, if you’re looking for a lot of violence or grey characters who make morally questionable choices, I don’t think this is your book. If you want to get really invested in a character because you like who they are and you want them to succeed, then this could definitely be a book for you.
The world building is intense, there is a lot of it to take in, but generally speaking, it wasn’t given to me via infodump. Every once in a while there was a little bit of that but it made sense in context and wasn’t so overdone I got bored. Most of the time the world was drip fed naturally and it just got bigger as I kept going with the story. There are tree creatures ripping up the country side, mages who can inhabit animal bodies, elves that can Step long distances, and magic potions that can store memories to name a few. I think this kind of world would appeal to people who like Michael J. Sullivan and are craving more elves and dwarves in their lives.
The writing style is very light and breezy and makes this a faster read than I expected it to be. It’s clearly a polished author and I could tell that they had written books before. I never had to re-read a section to figure out what was going on, I never hit a bit of dialogue that took me out of the moment for being awkward or forced, I never hit a super purple moment that made me roll my eyes or felt like she consulted the thesaurus too many times — it was just smooth sailing all the way through from cover to cover which is impressive given this is a long book. I read this via audiobook which was done by Kate Reading. If you’re like me, I crank her stuff to 1.7-2.0x and so the audiobook wasn’t nearly as long for me as it would be read at standard 1x, so I made it through this in a day or two.
I just wanted to give a quick review of my own as we sit and debate over who is going forward as our finalist!