by Sunya Mara. I listened to this book as an audiobook, and I must say that I really enjoyed it.  We follow a character named Vesper Vale. Who I in all honesty thought was named Vespa until I read the blurb for this book just and realized the narrator of the audiobook clearly pronounced the “er” closer to “a”. Oh well, it makes little difference here.  Versper is the daughter of failed revolutionaries, and she’s hiding away with her father together with people who’s been touched by the Storm. It’s a dark and dangerous storm that turns people who touch it into cursed creatures.  When Vesper tries to save a mother and her child from the storm, she ends up caught by it, and her father is forced to use his skill in icons to save Vesper from certain death. The only problem with that is he now reveals his location and puts a target on his and Vesper’s back.  While trying to get away, Vesper’s father gets taken away by Prince Dalca and Vesper swears to do whatever it takes to get her father back alive.  It’s a wonderful premise and a really good opening of the book that…

by Alexandra Rowland.  In this book we follow Kadou, the shy prince of Arasht, and his bodyguards as they investigate a break-in and tries to find the source of counterfeit money. So, this is a somewhat hard review to write because I’m honestly not sure what the book was about. It’s a book with some great elements, but also some less great ones.  Let’s start with the plot. There’s some sort of mystery at the core of this story. Counterfeit money has been found, and Kadou must find where they are from before this money spreads and his country loses its good reputation. It’s a good premise, but it’s like nothing happens. Things move at such a slow pace that we lose what’s happening and it all just becomes confusing, and every twist that happens are so obvious that it doesn’t even feel like a twist.  I kept reading and reading and it felt like I’d been doing so forever, and then I was still at just 20% or something. It was a pain to get through at times because there was nothing interesting happening.  In the end, the plot didn’t do anything for the story and it would have…