This book is the kind of fantasy that sucks me into the world created immediately. It is the stuff of high fantasy with unique world building, politics, and of course, dragons.
A common struggle I have with multiple point of view characters is that there is often at least one I feel like it is an effort to push through. Unfortunately, this was true of this book as I enjoyed some point of view characters more than others, and at times found one character to be a slog to get through. I was immediately hooked into Tesha and Ashadi’s points of view, and their first chapters left me wanting much more of their respective stories. Naili on the other hand did not draw me in and I found myself just wanting to get to the end of the chapter so I could move on to a more interesting character.
What the three different points of view did provide I found was a taste of different aspects of this world and the things essential to fantasy novels. By this I mean, each character was uniquely situated to reveal different details of the world and what was going on in it to give the reader a clearer view of the situation and put together their own thoughts on what it all means and which side of things they identify with the most. Ashadi gives an up close view on war and the best part is the fact that he gets to work alongside dragons. Super intriguingly, there is also depth to the dragons and their lives, particularly their pasts that opens them up to the knowledge that they are their own beings with intelligence and history prior to their role alongside dragon riders.
On another hand, Tesha gives a clearer view of the politics of the world. For this reason I found her storyline perhaps the most interesting because there is the combination of the inner world of politics, and the subterfuge she partakes in to find information on the families of the upper hierarchies in order to fight against what she feels is a broken system. Naili is the working woman view of the world, and as she has strange powers disrupting her daily life, she is forced to deal with the consequences of this and what it means for herself.
I really enjoyed the small ways in which each storyline tied together. More importantly, how the characters tied together in some unknown to them way. There are characters from each point of view that is essentially this books six degrees of separation and it was always so fascinating to see when a character would crop up in another persons point of view that had some sort of tie to the main character from another point of view.
With the way this first book ended I absolutely need the second book ASAP because it left me with so many questions and a hint of the tantalizing answers to come. I’m super excited to see more of this world and very much enjoyed the start to this new series.
