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Rating: 4 out of 5
Genre: Sci-Fi / Fantasy, 4 Stars
People who should read this: Dark stories, romance, action, suspense, a strong female cast, and grey characters. This book has something for everyone.
*I was given an ARC of this book from the author for an honest review.*
It’s a bold move to retell the first book from a different perspective when the world is still waiting to know what happens next. Most authors wait until the end of a series to do that. By then, the fans are clamoring to stay in the world in whatever capacity they can. Watching the latest books coming out, this seems to be a trend. But doing it for your second book might just be your downfall.
Stick with me… I did give this book four stars. There’s a reason that I found a way to love it. However, I’m worried I jumped on another Kingkiller Chronicle ship and I’ll never get to know how this story will end. The Savior’s Sister was essentially The Savior’s Champion but through Leila’s eyes. All the details of how she becomes who she is in the first book are revealed. I get that we might need to learn that eventually, we might need to see what her father is trying to accomplish, but did it need to be in it’s own book? Whole chapters from the first book were just repeated. Couldn’t these pieces have been revealed slowly as we move the story forward?
Cue *mystery*
Good thing I didn’t get a chance to reread The Savior’s Champion before picking up The Savior’s Sister. I knew the gist of the ending. I just forgot how everyone eventually got there.
And that's where my main issue comes from. The reason that I loved The Savior’s Champion so much was because I didn’t know how it was going to end. It was a dark, gritty mystery filled with a lovely turn of events that I don’t want to spoil (just know that I gave the book 5 stars). Instead of basking in all of that mystery, the unknown, I already knew where the players were going to end up which put me in a bored position. It took me about 200 pages to get into the book. It might have been around the time Tobias made his first appearance that I suddenly got a change of heart.
With all this negative talk, how did Moreci pull off such a high rating???
Because somehow, even with writing that isn’t totally my jam, she knows how to make me feel all the things just like she did in the first book. She pulled those emotions out of me and shaped them into the animals that she wanted. Due to events of the past week, I was able to finish this book in two days. Have you seen the size of it? That’s no small feat, trust me. I couldn’t put the book down. I was on the edge of my seat feeling all the things even if I knew where the characters were going. How does she do it?
Moreci also pulled off my favorite thing… gray characters. I’m a sucker for them. Who needs perfectly good or bad when that’s not how the world works. I may not feel the love for Leila that everyone else seems to be feeling, but she was a believable person making decisions that fit where she was in life. She’s a twenty-year-old girl with no one to trust, no mastermind experience, and an anger that could fuel her city. I mean, some of her ideas needed to be a little on the “what are you thinking” scale of things. Sanity is clearly out of the window. These are the very reasons that I applaud Moreci and still found a way to love this book even if I’m salty and demand that the next book be about what happens next.
Okay… I’m really not that assertive in real life.
If you loved the first book, you’ll probably really enjoy The Savior’s Sister too. It’s just not the great masterpiece that we’ve grown to love. The writing wasn’t able to meet the high bar that was set with the first book. Even the side characters didn’t have the same grit and depth. It’s these little things that lost any hope of the book being higher than four stars. If you’re going to make me reread the same story, that story has to blow my mind. What I got was sloppy. Using color as a way to show the other character’s emotions felt like a cheap shot of showing instead of telling. And in doing that, it left a lot of the magic system murky to the reader. Like she can’t shadow walk if she’s too preoccupied with getting beat up????
So go in with a grain of salt and if you haven’t read the first book…which ummmmm… what are you waiting for?
Happy Reading
Love Kait
Reading Challenge: 133/175