Eighteen-year-old Ziva prefers metal to people. She spends her days tucked away in her forge, safe from society and the anxiety it causes her, using her magical gift to craft unique weapons imbued with power. Then Ziva receives a commission from a powerful warlord, and the result is a sword capable of stealing its victims’ secrets. A sword that can cut far deeper than the length of its blade. A sword with the strength to topple kingdoms. When Ziva learns of the warlord’s intentions to use the weapon to enslave all the world under her rule, she takes her sister and flees.
Ziva’a character was definitely interesting. It was nice to hear about how she learnt how to become a blade smith and the process in which she creates her weapons. It went into a lot of detail about how she imbues her magic into the metals and how she incidentally comes up with the various abilities for each weapon. I think she is a very relatable character though I felt like a lot of the guilt she holds in relation to her sister and her upbringing was unnecessary.
Temra I think holds a lot of resentment to Ziva for being too protective over her and for making them have to uproot and flee. But I think again this was very relatable, her sister is the one with the magic powers and the infamy and I can understand why she would want a little bit of separation from that and be her own person. Though I don’t think it was very fair of her to throw that back in her sister’s face.
I like that there was a bit of depth to each of the characters. Kellyn wasn’t just a muscly mercenary, there was more to Petrik than what we are initially told so that kept me intrigued and interested in finding out more about them all. I liked that through their travels they all formed a bond of friendship before the romance started. The romance aspect was a little cringe for me to be honest. Because she has sheltered herself from the world so much Ziva’s social skills aren’t the greatest so her trying to process her feelings for Kellyn was a bit exhausting. I was glad when she just accepted that he might actually like her and moved forward. It just felt a little juvenile in that aspect and then right after we would get quite a graphic fight scenes so that juxtaposition would pull me out of the story.
I’ve found all of Tricia Levenseller’s books to be quite fast paced and action packed and this was in that realm. I think there was just so many scenes were they are just travelling from town to town trying to escape the warlord that I didn’t feel particularly rooted in the story. Though I’m looking forward to learning more about the magic system and this world as the series progresses and we find out what is going to happen next.
⭐️3/5 stars I was expecting more but enjoyed it for what it was!
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