okay, I was expecting big things from this and it was really really interesting. this is an avatar comic and it said immediately off to the end of the series and basically the earth King, aang and Zuko start this thing called the harmony restoration movement. this  is where they're basically removing all the fire nation colonies from the earth kingdom and giving the land back to the earth nation people. it's going really well until they get to the first colony that was created 100 years ago, yu dao. zuko tries to get all the fire nation people to leave yu dao but the people don't want to leave! their families that be living there for generations and the mayor of the town is a fire nation man that married an earth bender woman (with an earth bending fire nation daughter!). 

this is such an amazing book! it really tackles difficult themes of colonisation and shows how not everything is a right vs wrong battle. i was still able to take a lot from it but children could definitely still read this and have it be their first exposure to these sorts of themes. 

All the stuff I expected would be really hard to do well, was executed flawlessly! however... in comparison, all the stuff that seems easy to do was really poorly written😭😭 The aang and katara relationship felt extremely forced (not just because I'm a zutara girlie... i swear). they just acted like normal friends but then every now and again they would call each other honey and it flopped majorly.

also, the whole reason why the comic is called 'the promise' is because during one of the first scenes of the comic, zuko tells aang 'if you ever see me start to act like my dad, you need to kill me' and aang agrees (even though he just spent the entire finale trying to not kill ozai????). anyway, when zuko refuses to force the fire nation to leave, before he understands the situation, aang actually considers killing zuko????? huh??? i thought that whole thing was a bit contrived because that layer of the stroy wasn't really necessary. the whole story was about colonisation and I get that zuko is conflicted about leading and being like his father, but I still think it wasn't necessary (maybe if it was well done I would have been fine with it...). 

but all of that day, this story was really well done. I was actually like very shocked by how well it was done! i highly encourage people to read if you like atla!! ps the toph and sokka side quests was a lot of fun😊 4.75 stars