In her debut novel and the first in a series, Kamilah
Cole shows the power of love between sisters:
When the her people needed a hero, a way to sway the war in their favour, Fallon prayed to the Gods and become the Child Empyrean. As the child Empyrean she was able to channel the power of the Gods. Five years later, Fallon still has all the powers, but no war to fight in. When she is forced to attend an international peace summit all she expects to show off her powers and go home but instead her older sister Elara find herself bonded to an enemy dragon. Both women have impossible choices to make in order not only to save themselves, their island and people but the world as well.
This
is a good debut novel and I found myself invested early in the story and where
Cole was going to take the characters. I really enjoyed that this book took
more of a political that I thought was going to be but at the same time there
was a lot less action than I thought there would be. As this is Cole's debut
novel, I felt that there were some aspects in this book that you could tell it
was. I think that this mainly seen in the world building, in the character arc
of Fallon and the book was a bit predictable.
Elara
was my favourite POV in this book and is a solid/interesting character right
from the beginning. She is the older sister of the Child Empyrean and all she
wants is to make her own way in the world get out of her sister’s shadow. I
found that in her dragon situation there was more at stake and she was in a dangerous
situation with the Dragon school she finds herself in. I also think that Elara
has an interesting character Arc and how she has to adapt to the situation she
finds herself in as well as question everything that she knows. I wish that
Cole would have spent more time in the school aspect and how much Elara was out
of place/different from all the other students there. There are some scenes,
but I think that this is glazed over in this book.
I
was not really interested in Fallon's POV. To begin with I thought that
Fallon's POV was going to be interesting with her being the Child Empyrean and
having the power of the Gods, but her POV really fell off for me. Fallon is
supposed to be 17 but she acts like a petulant child at times, maybe this is
due to her surviving war and being famous bringing but it seems like she has to
be constantly reminded about the stakes, like she keeps forgetting them or
something. She is constantly bored when her sister's life is at stake and she
just proves many times throughout the book that she is just a child.
I
wish there was more about the drakes, there is a lot made of them but we do not
get that much interaction with them. And i wish there were more than one scene
of Drake vs Dragon, I mean that is what the Drakes are there for, but we get
very little action there.
This
book is touted as a Jamaican fantasy novel, as I am not Jamaican and am not
familiar about Jamaican culture, hell I have never even been to Jamaica, I
cannot really comment about this aspect. However, I did find the world that
Cole created interesting, but I felt that there were a lot of gaps along the
way and we don’t really understand major aspects of the world and the war that
occurred before this book until the latter part of this book, so there were
points when i was questioning things. So much is made about the war that I
actually checked (twice) to make sure that I was reading the first book in the
series. I think this series would benefit with a novella placed before this
book iron out a few of these points as well as have more about how Fallon
became the Child Empyrean and her feats in the war and why she is revered
now.
Based
upon the ending I will totally be picking up the next book. I loved the Arc of
Elara’s character and need to know how Cole is going to move the story along.
Totally an author for people to check out.
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