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| 4 Stars |
If at first you don’t succeed..
You try again, and try they did. This is the second collab between Jaymin Eve & Leia Stone, first being the Hive Trilogy, and I am happy to say they got it right this time. It’s not 100% amazement and wonder to be honest. It is light years better than the previous collab attempt though.
There are two shifter races, the Wolves and the Bears, each governed by a monarch, a King for the bears and a Queen for the wolves and the international balance of power between the two is determined on how many of the boroughs of New York city each of them have under their control.
The book starts with the death of the Red Queen, the most powerful Wolf Queen to date, and the fact that our heroine, Arianna, will have to battle for her birthright to be the new Queen while she has to figure out who killed the old one. Things go a bit haywire from there as magic wielding shifters, witches, magical animals and fae are thrown at us.
It is quite well written and detailed, keeping the mystery and having me wonder about things throughout. The heroine is strong and level headed, the hero is again quite a mystery though from the little I saw I liked him, the few prominent side characters were also good, the mysterious enemy sounds worthy, strong and actually dangerous and more often than not it had me chuckling to myself.
Through all this goodness though, there were things that didn’t bode well with me. Even though there was danger and I saw it, it was absent from parts of the book. Arianna tells us that heirs have died during the Summit and that the tasks were mostly extremely difficult and/or dangerous, yet she was lucky to get all the easy stuff and the ones that she was great at.
While I liked that the heroine is strong it also annoyed me that she was unchallenged, making her look ridiculously strong. She was an iron baseball bat while the other heirs were graham crackers. Guess which of the two would win in a fight. If her opponents were made to be stronger then her true strength would have come across more natural and balanced.
Side characters have a purpose, which means they need to exchange words and act. Here we seem to have a few that could be interesting - Arianna adviser, best friend, friends, Kade and his war adviser - but we don’t really get to see them. There was insufficient dialogue between them and no matter how much info the MC gives it comes out dry as the desert sand if there is no significant dialogue and interaction.
All in all I really did enjoy this book immensely and I sincerely hope that these negative attributes will be rectified and balanced out in the second book, which I honestly can’t wait to read.
Long Live The Queen!
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