I have started a few books in the last month or two that I fully intend to finish but they aren’t quite holding my attention and I keep starting new books rather than going back to them. So I feel like I have been struggling to get through novels but then I look back over my recent reads and realize, it’s not been that bad.
Anyway, I was both interested in this book and skeptical because sometimes the booktok hype is just too much. However, while I was a bit unsure at first, the story pulled me in, and this book even made me stay up too late for just one more chapter. In retrospect, it’s not necessarily that this is a really good book but it is entertaining and fast paced so exactly the right thing for a book slump.
This is a world where the vampires are in the top spots of government and world ruling but powerful magic users also have their places. People with the potential for magic are marked early, and then develop their powers as teens, and can include fire, water, or wind powers, among some of the ones mentioned. There’s a whole tier system so some people are born with a metal marker on their head, which relates to their power level or type (bronze, silver, gold), and then size is another indicator of how much power the user will have. It didn’t really get too deep into the details about say a magic user with a large bronze medallion (that’s not the right word for it but don’t feel like searching the book for it) vs a small silver etc.
Gladiator style games and competitions have existed for a long time but sometime in the last generation, they went from being optional to mandatory – Arvelle competed in the Sands six years and came out the champion but lost her best friend in the process. Now it’s six years later, she is responsible for her two younger brothers, their mother dead and all other family long gone. She ends up making a deal with a vampire plotting to kill the emperor and has to re-enter the arena for the Sundering, a more specialized set of trials for people that want to be part of the royal guard.
There are political machinations, including different factions among the vampires, and then separate movements among everyone else. It seems the emperor has also been a long spree to vibe out all other magical creatures that might challenge his place so there’s been lots of wars and battles. Nothing about the set up or story is exactly new or super original but it is very entertaining as a read and kept me engaged. The novel also introduced some religious aspects, and I expect that in book 2, the gods might very well show up as characters rather than simply being world building and development. In fact there was some pretty obvious foreshadowing related to the god of death and chaos that will likely play out in the next book (and it’s too obvious to not come up early in book 2).
It also doesn’t take long for two potential love interests to show up, one being the dependable and good one while the other one is violent and seemingly bad but naturally appears to be playing a long game a few steps ahead of everyone else and has yet-to-be-determined motivations. I admit, even though we had vampires, and they eventually turn out to be related, it wasn’t till close to the end of the novel when there was a comment about, “he saw her first” that I had an eureka moment, and was like, “wait, a second, are these guys inspired by the Salvatore brothers?”
There was a whole thing at the end of season 3 of The Vampire Diaries where Elena as a human chooses Stefan and tells Damon, “maybe if we met first” and then there is a flashback where the viewer finds out Damon met Elena first but made her forget. Maybe, I am dense that I didn’t catch it earlier but suddenly Rorrik’s preferred method of killing by ripping people’s hearts out felt like such an obvious clue that I had overlooked, and I couldn’t help but see Damon Salvatore retroactively. Arvelle herself was fine, a little too generic to stand out from other romantasy FMCs but fortunately, she also doesn’t stand out in a negative way. She does seem to take some things at face value a bit too easily and doesn’t always make great decisions but there are some plot explanations.
