Legends of Marithia: Prophecies Awakening

Peter Koevari

The prophesy is arising, and the dark witch is on the loose. Two opposing prophesies are at odds, and it is not yet clear whether the balance will tip in favour of the light or the darkness.

Although I was reading on a Kobo, and it’s purely black and white, I really enjoyed the pictures of the various characters that were interspersed in the text. It’s nice to get a view of how I should be imagining the characters in my mind, and it adds more reality to the read.

Dragons! It’s been far too long since I read a book with dragons in it. This novel has dragons. Several of them. In fact, they are invisible dragons most of the time, but they are still there! I think this is another story point that could have been made more of, coupled with more details on Varten’s training, and a bit more of Kassina’s history. Although the prologue covers that, I couldn’t really understand why Kassina had gone bad so quickly. I can understand how seeing her parents killed like that was traumatic, but not so bad that she feels the need to laugh manically at every human ideal and set fire to things after draining the blood of innocents.

This novel reminds me a fair bit of Mercedes Lackey’s Obsidian Mountain trilogy. The elves and their forest, the dark demons who feed from the living, and the man who must save them all against the odds. The notion of the special device is different though, and I wouldn’t say the styles of writing were at all the same.

This novel does sentences/paragraphs at the start of the novel in the right way. They add something to the story that you wouldn’t otherwise realise from the point of view. Often they highlight a character’s perspective that you don’t actually get in the rest of the text.

Ah! There was one point where I was sure they were about to be uncovered, and then bam! It was something else! Koevari really sprung it on me, and I was really unable to put the book down in anticipation. he does this cliff-hanger technique in such a sneaky way lots of times, and it really gets things going.

Sadly, I wasn’t at all convinced by the dialogue or scenery in this novel. The dialogue again felt a bit stilted to me (although I know that getting dialogue right is really very difficult) and I felt like occasionally the characters were having monologues. The scenery was often described in similes, and it was just too much detail. For example, the elven forest is guarded by faeries and special elven guards. And this is stated basically like that, with a bit more detail. I feel that a better way of doing it would have been to have the queen and her daughter enter the forest and come across each of these things. Perhaps it would have used up some more words, but I feel like it would have been really valuable. Another thing was the epithet of ‘hot spurting blood’, it just came up so many times!
I found it interesting to read, and I certainly wouldn’t say no if I won the second book in this series from Goodreads this time around. I likely wouldn’t buy it for myself though, simply because I don’t think it’s a reread, and also because I have so many other novels on my to-read list.

I’d recommend this novel for adults only due to the erotic mixed with horror content of Kassina’s rituals – a particular episode with a virgin still sticks in my mind uncomfortably. A decent read, quite compelling towards the end. I only had those minor complaints, and it certainly wasn’t a trial to read the novel – I enjoyed it. Probably three stars from me.

I received this ebook free after missing out on a hard copy through Goodreads: First Reads. This did not influence my opinion in any way.