Rating: 4.5/5

Genre: YA Fantasy

Recommend Age: 13+ (some violence)

I received a free copy of this book through KidLitExchange. All opinions are my own.

To save her sister’s life, Faris must smuggle magic into a plague-ridden neighboring kingdom in this exciting and dangerous start to a brand-new fantasy duology.

Faris grew up fighting to survive in the slums of Brindaigel while caring for her sister, Cadence. But when Cadence is caught trying to flee the kingdom and is sold into slavery, Faris reluctantly agrees to a lucrative scheme to buy her back, inadvertently binding herself to the power-hungry Princess Bryn, who wants to steal her father’s throne.

Now Faris must smuggle stolen magic into neighboring Avinea to incite its prince to alliance—magic that addicts in the war-torn country can sense in her blood and can steal with a touch. She and Bryn turn to a handsome traveling magician, North, who offers protection from Avinea’s many dangers, but he cannot save Faris from Bryn’s cruelty as she leverages Cadence’s freedom to force Faris to do anything—or kill anyone—she asks. Yet Faris is as fierce as Bryn, and even as she finds herself falling for North, she develops schemes of her own.

With the fate of kingdoms at stake, Faris, Bryn, and North maneuver through a dangerous game of magical and political machinations, where lives can be destroyed—or saved—with only a touch. - Amazon.com

Here I come again with another book about magic (see? There is more than just Harry Potter) and again I will say this book is also unqiue in the world of magic. This book is almost a mixture of fantasy and dystopian set in an earlier time, but what makes it really unqiue is that while there are similar high fantasy tropes, it gives us a female character who is very independent and who loses her love interest in the first chapter. We follow this character as she tries to rebuild from that lose and tries to fix a mistake she made months ago. I found all the characters very developed to a point of almost all of them being very complex characters. Not a character was who they seemed to be in the first few chapters of this book. The plot development was also very complex but very rewarding in the end. The pacing was perfection and the writing was phenomenal.

While the book is easily one of my favorites of this year, I do feel that this book can be a bit hard to understand if the reader is not paying expert attention to all the details of the book. There are also a lot of characters in this book and the reader might find it a bit difficult to keep up with all of them.

Verdict: Hands down one of my favorite books of this year. I felt very inspired by Faris and North and I think this book would be a good medium for someone who doesn't really enjoy high fantasy but wants to read a book that is almost high fantasy. Definitely an author that needs to be on your automatic to-buy list as well.