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 really hooks the reader in. The world alone is so interesting and this whole concept of the storm is great.
Vesper is a likable character who’s easy to root for. She wants to do good, but she’s first and foremost a little on the selfish side. She just wants to save her father, and in the beginning she doesn’t really care about much more than that. But you can still understand her, which I find is a great thing.
The characters in this book is a little on the more tropey kind of side, they are not unique and you can more or less tell from the first moment who they are and what role they will play and how they will progress throughout the story. I wish they had been more unique and well developed, but I don’t know, I think it still works. Perhaps because I listened to this book and audiobooks in general is a little more forgiving I think.
The world was well developed, even if I do think there was room for more. I found this world so incredibly interesting that I just wanted to learn more. But here we get the basics and just a smidge more than we actually need. I do hope that maybe we’ll learn more in the sequel though.
The writing is simple and effective and fits well with the genre. I think the characters all were distinguishable from each other even in audio, which is great.
One downside is that I felt it was a bit slow in the beginning, and I would have loved to get to the good stuff a little sooner.
I also really like that it wasn’t heavy with romance, there’s just a hint of something here and instead the focus lies on the plot and what needs to be done. I appreciate that a lot.
The plot is solid and well-paced and interesting enough to pull me through the book. It’s perhaps nothing unique per se, but it’s good and there are some twists that adds new layers to the plot and makes it even more interesting. Now, the twists wasn’t really twists for me since I saw them coming a long way ahead, but I still enjoyed all of it.
The ending was a little bit of a disappointment for me because it was as close to a cliffhanger as you can get without it being one, and I would have wanted a little more there in the end, but I’m not mad about it.
I can highly recommend this book, and I think the author has a very good debut here, and I can’t wait to read the sequel.
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