Expected publication date: May 22, 2018
Cover blurb:
Follows two fiercely independent young women, centuries apart, who hold the power to save their world…or doom it.
When assassins ambush her best friend, the crown prince, Rielle Dardenne risks everything to save him, exposing her ability to perform all seven kinds of elemental magic. The only people who should possess this extraordinary power are a pair of prophesied queens: a queen of light and salvation and a queen of blood and destruction. To prove she is the Sun Queen, Rielle must endure seven trials to test her magic. If she fails, she will be executed…unless the trials kill her first.
A thousand years later, the legend of Queen Rielle is a mere fairy tale to bounty hunter Eliana Ferracora. When the Undying Empire conquered her kingdom, she embraced violence to keep her family alive. Now, she believes herself untouchable–until her mother vanishes without a trace, along with countless other women in their city. To find her, Eliana joins a rebel captain on a dangerous mission and discovers that the evil at the heart of the empire is more terrible than she ever imagined.
As Rielle and Eliana fight in a cosmic war that spans millennia, their stories intersect, and the shocking connections between them ultimately determine the fate of their world–and of each other.
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This was an interesting read for me; totally outside my normal wheelhouse, but everything I had heard about it was good so I decided to give it a try. (You know me, if there aren’t half-naked men on the cover, lol!) There were definitely parts I enjoyed-the first few chapters were kickass and exciting and totally dragged me in. Of the main characters I was definitely more interested in Eliana than Rielle, though there were aspects about the Queen that were intriguing. The prologue was what sucked me into the story and while it gave away some of the future happenings, it also set up the need to know exactly what happened with Rielle.
Rielle Dardenne is the daughter of the Lord Commander of Celdaria and she is hiding something from almost everyone. Her ability to control all seven elements of magic which means she will either be the savior (Sun Queen) or the destruction (Blood Queen) of her kingdom. A thousand years in the future, Eliana Ferracora is a bounty hunter (the Dread of Orline) for the Undying Empire that has seized her city of Orline, forced to kill rebels until women and girls start disappearing…including her mother.
The story is told in alternating chapters, and while I understand the choice honestly for me it made it really hard to follow the story sometimes. I would have preferred each half of the story to be presented separately with the necessary overlaps presented at the end. And that is totally my personal preference as I know other readers have liked that the format allowed contrast between the characters. For me though I ended up reading through Rielle’s chapters faster because I wanted to get back to Eliana’s side of the story.
But it’s not really Eliana…I just wanted to get back to The Wolf! He was definitely my favorite character and I’d love a side book just about him. I don’t want to say much about him because the discovery of the full role he plays in the story as I didn’t expect the big reveal. Well, I did but my brain was strained trying to figure it out how it happened until the full explanation. Part of the reason behind that is the length of the book, which I felt was overly long. There were some areas where I thought the story could have been condensed, less exposition and more action. Don’t get me wrong, there is a certain amount of background that needs to be set, but there is a point where it becomes too much. For me, that were the chapters around Rielle and the trials she undergoes to prove she is the Sun Queen.
Overall, I would recommend this book to those that love high fantasy novels; it isn’t what I would consider a romance which is my normal genre of choice. There are some romantic elements though, and I think those will come out more in the subsequent novels which I definitely want to read. While I think this is being touted as YA, with some of the darker themes, I would definitely recommend this for an older teen audience and not younger. (Of course, the maturity of the reader will factor in!) I do hope the story tightens up in in the next 2 books in the trilogy, but am looking forward to learning more about Rielle and The Wolf and how their story progresses!
Thank you to Netgalley and Sourcebooks Fire for the chance to read this early!