I’ve enjoyed another book by this author so I was happy to see her make it to the finals this year!
Just based of the chapter titles I could tell we’re getting multiple POVs, Darin, Suriin, and Elissa. Again, I was pretty excited because two or three POVs tends to be my sweet spot. I find that if I’m not feeling one of the characters maybe I’ll enjoy the other two and get through the book quickly. However, if I don’t like the MC of a single POV story I can DNF fairly quickly.
This book has a lot of world building — I mean a lot of world building. It’s also kind of like a blend of fantasy and sci fi since a lot of it has to do with other planets and moons but also the dragons that live on them. I really liked the landscape of this world, Darin is from a place called Caldera and it is in fact a bunch of craters and different villages are nestled inside them. A lot of the flora of the world glows slightly, but some are as bright as lamps and this kind of thing brings a lot of surreal imagery to the reading experience. One of the reasons many of the Caldera people live in the craters because there all sorts of monsters that live up above on the surface. Darin eventually becomes bonded to a moon hound, he can sing magic, and all sorts of neat stuff. There’s a light touch of steampunk as well with things like steam-driven elevators and other tech scattered throughout the story.
There are two other POVs, both girls, who both have lilac hair which marks them as magic users. Not going to lie, that tripped me up at first because I’d get lost about who I was reading about despite the fact they were pretty different. One of them is living on a moon though and called The Untouched, she’s living a pretty brutal life while Suriin isn’t so much. Her parents are both sodals (wizards/magic users) and she’s supposed to go off and train her emotion-based magic and dream-walking magic.
I didn’t necessarily know where this was going for a while, there was a lot of build up before the plot started to get going. The world building and the character’s backstories were taking the lead while the plot only started to catch up about halfway through the book or maybe more. For me, this ended up feeling really slow because I wasn’t particularly bonding with the characters. They were all kind of on the younger side, some of them pretty impulsive and hard headed, and I just wasn’t feeling it for a while. I think if I was enjoying the characters a little more I wouldn’t have had such a slow start with it. It’s not to say anything was wrong with them, I just tend to prefer older characters over coming of age stories. I did get invested once the plot started to pick up and I could see the story coming into focus.
Overall, I think this would appeal most to Sanderson fans who want a huge expansive world that’s very thought out. There’s dragons, secret societies, various kinds of magic, different planets and moons that are all interconnected with characters scattered throughout allowing a deep exploration of different settings.
When Kristen gets her review up we will have a score!