Stars: 3 out of 5
I love the world of the Craft that the author so carefully crafted (pun totally intended). However, I didn’t love this book as much as I loved the previous ones in the series.
It took me a while to figure out why. This book has all the right ingredients: a compelling protagonist (and I love Tara), a mystery that threatens something she cares about, so the personal stakes are front and center, and another facet of this complex world carefully painted and shown to the readers. I should have loved this as much as I loved the previous books! But instead, this book left me mildly irritated while I was reading it, and a bit dissatisfied when I finished.
The biggest reason is that, as much as I like Tara Abenati, she shines when given good secondary characters to bounce her ideas off of. Even though the previous book was mostly about Kai, Tara’s brief appearances were memorable. Or her interactions with Abelar, Shale, and Selene in Alt Columb. Characters make good stories, and good characters make excellent ones.
Unfortunately, secondary characters are sorely lacking in this book. And by that I mean the relationship that is front and center in this story – the one between Tara and Dawn. I was actually looking forward to seeing how Tara in the role of a mentor for once. To see how she would approach this responsibility and what kind of teacher she would choose to be. And the answer is – a rather boring one.
Yes, I understand that the theory of the Craft is important to the story, but I think the lectures are a bit overdone here. It bogs down the story and kills the momentum. I mean, there is literally nothing going on in this book between the first attack of the Raiders on Tara’s village and the last stand during which the Father is kidnapped. And that’s about a third of the book. I admit that my attention started to wander in that section, and I had to put the book away for a bit and read something more exciting before I came back to it.
It would have been okay if Dawn was a more fleshed-out character. As it stands, we don’t know anything about her apart from the fact that she wandered onto this farm with her father, and was not treated well after he died. We don’t know about her dreams, her fears, or what she is like when she isn’t trying very hard to be the best student Tara could want. Try as I may, I can’t picture her in my head. She is not a person, but a concept. I don’t feel a connection to her like I felt for other characters in previous books.
And without that connection, everything that happens in the end of the book, and it supposed to have the impact of a gut punch… feels flat.
Same with Tara’s home village. I know I was supposed to grow to care for it by the end of the book and understand why Tara would fight so hard to save it, but I was mostly irritated with everyone instead, including Tara. And since I didn’t care for the stakes, I wasn’t fully invested either.
Don’t get me wrong, this is still a solid entry in the Craft series and it advances the story. It’s just not the strongest entry to date.
PS: I received an advanced copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.