3/5 stars
Synopsis
Warning! This section contains spoilers, if you would like to avoid these spoilers, jump to the review below.
The book started with Brenna finding out that the king had been shot. The two nations in the book went to war after the death of the king. Brenna traveled to the other country with her friend, Katiel.
Katiel found a letter addressed to the person who killed the king. The letter revealed that the person who supposedly killed the king was framed for the kill. Upon learning this, Brenna and Katiel decided to try and stop the war.
Katiel and Brenna left home to meet the person mentioned in the letter.
They reached the meeting place and encountered someone, but the person ran. They were able to find the person again the next day and talked to her. She told them to meet her somewhere. They went to the meeting place and the woman they were there to meet was suspicious. But then Katiel’s teacher appeared and said that Katiel could wield (do magic).
This earned the trust of the woman, and the characters asked for an explanation of what happened with the man who was framed for the killing of the king. They discovered that the secretary of war had engineered the assassination and the war because the king had been too peaceful.
Katiel tried wielding the ore but failed.
The group reached a train station and started traveling by train. When the train came to a bridge, the passengers all started screaming because the bridge was broken. They were able to get out of the train car after it fell into the water, but one of the party members drowned. The documents with proof of the assassination plot were ruined.
Katiel kissed Anton, one of the people in her group, then woke up to find that the ore she used to do magic was gone. Most likely stolen by Anton.
Brenna finally reached her brother-in-law, Jay, and tried warning him with the letter she had found. But Jay didn’t do anything, and was angry, and Brenna realized that he had been a part of the king’s assassination.
Katiel and Brenna were captured and thrown in a cell. They had a fight, and then they met Inigo Farro, the man who was framed. He was in a cell across from them. Katiel was finally able to wield the ore and fashioned a hair pin so Brenna could pick the lock on the cell. They freed Inigo Farro too.
They escaped prison, but then they were captured again.
There was an explosion and a fire started in the building. Only Katiel was able to get free, and Brenna told her to go find the royal family, who they had been looking for before they were captured.
They rescued the surviving royal family, escaped the burning building, and then the book jumped forward a week to when Brenna was given an award for her bravery by the new queen.
Review
First off, this book has a very beautiful cover. I really, really like the cover.
I liked how the author utilized emotion in the book. The book was filled with it. Of course, I did think some of the emotion was childish/silly, but it fit with how the characters were designed.
The ending of the book was much better than the beginning. The beginning was fine, but I didn’t feel like there were really any stakes. But the ending definitely had stakes. It got really intense, with both the emotions and the scenes.
I especially loved the emotion of Katiel after she shaped the ore into a gun and shot someone. I could almost feel her disgust and shame.
There was a scene where a train crashed, resulting in one of the party members dying and the documents proving the war was set up being destroyed, was a really well done try/fail cycle. The ending had multiple try/fail cycles, from the characters trying to tell someone in charge about the framing to the person behind the plot finding out and burning their evidence and trying to kill them, to a POV shift where one of the characters was translating for the warring army generals but they started fighting, and he ended up shooting and killing his friend on accident.
The book was really hard to finish. Most of the book was super slow.
I felt like the humor was a little strange, and didn’t work. A character would say something weird or slightly nasty and they would all start laughing. I didn’t understand because I didn’t feel like it was funny. I felt like a lot of the things that were said and were portrayed as funny were secret jabs at a someone’s character.
I didn’t understand Katiel’s attraction to Anton. He was a jerk most of the time. He might have had a pretty face, but he was not pretty on the inside.
I didn’t understand how they survived the train crash. They were in a train car, which doesn’t have seatbelts, going who knows how fast, and fell off of a hundred foot cliff into a lake. There’s a reason things like cars and rollercoasters have seatbelts and harnesses…humans break easily. The characters would have been tossed around so badly in that train car that injuries would have been inevitable. But no, all of them except for the one character who drowned all walked away. I do not understand how they survived.
I liked how the author utilized emotion in the book. The book was filled with it. Of course, I did think some of the emotion was childish/silly, but it fit with how the characters were designed.
I especially loved the emotions of Katiel after she shaped the ore into a gun and shot someone. I could almost feel her disgust and shame.
The train crashing, resulting in one of the party members dying and the documents being destroyed, was a really well done try/fail cycle. The ending had multiple try/fail cycles, from the characters trying to tell someone in charge about the framing to the person behind the plot finding out and burning their evidence and trying to kill them, to a POV shift where one of the characters was translating for the warring army generals but they started fighting, and he ended up shooting and killing his friend on accident.
The ending of the book was much better than the beginning. The beginning was fine, but I didn’t feel like there were really any stakes. But the ending definitely had stakes. The ending got really intense, with the emotions and the scenes.
Overall, the book was good, but it did have some oddities in addition to being hard to get into.
Fireheart Books 