by Rebecca L Garcia

YA Fantasy, Independently Published in 2021, 344 Pages

What I Didn’t Like:

Overuse of adjectives. Some of them are beautiful (more on this in the next section) but there are many that are unnecessary. It can make for clunky prose.
Tell vs show when it comes to emotion. The descriptions are so poetic for scenery that it is even more shocking when the emotions are just typed out with nothing to back them up. You don’t feel it with her/them.
Some jumps in time. They’re small but frustrating.

Descriptive language adds a poetic flare to the settings. The author does a good job of describing the settings in a way that makes them easy to picture clearly. Often in the setting descriptions the language almost sounds like poetry.
The ending is intense. It ups the stakes and makes you question who you can trust leading into the sequel.
Morgana. She’s a deeper character than we get a chance to explore in this book (although I have hopes we can explore her more in the subsequent books) and she’s definitely coming across as morally grey (my favorite).
Fae, magic, and the idea of a staff to allow mortals to wield magic are all intriguing and well done.