Dear Readers!
Orion’s Price, is now live on Amazon! https://www.amazon.com/dp/B079J4ZSWW. The print edition has been prepared and will be available shortly!
A huge “Thank you!” to all of you who pre-ordered it! That means the world to us!
Owen & Jordan
When is the next book?? When is she going to find out about her mother. I know so she should know soon?
Loved it 😀
And I noticed little of foreshadowing in this one and in Apollyon Gambit. 😀
So the next one this year I hope. 😀
I was wondering whether you forgot that you had written and published a new novel 😉
There’s a bunch of proofreading misses as usual (“event” (in the sense that it probably once was “even then”) or Mariwen going “don’t them” (or something; I forgot where precisely this was – missing a “tell” anyway)) but not too many, I think.
Switching the story to be more about Mariwen wasn’t as much as a concern as I thought it’d be. Also maybe because we still got some Kris POVs. Unfortunately, I really wasn’t sold on the idea of sending a basically still ill super-famous person into enemy territory as a sort of spy – there’s this, I thought, great subplot in book 2 or 3, where Kris gets taken along on a special forces mission, even though everyone knows it’s a bad idea. And it indeed goes sideways. Great, since the “normal” thing to do is of course to have the protagonist somehow still save the day, against all odds. It was refreshing that someone actually went “no, really, it’s stupid and would never work out like that realistically”.
But this entire plot was basically based on the opposite of that, and even though the novel acknowledges that on many levels it just didn’t convince me of its plot.
So that aside I of course did my usual absolute loathing of Rafe, so the premise plus that I wasn’t in the mood to see Kris tortured again plus that moment where Mariwen’s mother extols on all his virtues frankly kinda made me want to throw my ebook reader into the nearest wall and quit the series altogether.
But I at least wanted to finish the novel and although Rafe unfortunately survives I managed to kinda reconcile myself with the novel. Mariwen was fun to follow, there wasn’t anything too dramatic with Kris, I was actually surprised by the surprising surprise of the romance maybepossible going into a different direction than I would have guessed (which was very surprising as usually romantic subplots are the most predictable plots there are) and Rafe wasn’t mentioned too often later on.
So that was all kinda OK but in the end I was still sitting there going “those last two novels haven’t done much for the series”. The main conflict barely progressed in any meaningful way. I thought there’d be some progress with the relationships and I suppose there is, but it’s in the end it’s still “complicated”, so maybe actually not. Some character development especially for Mariwen but I’m not too sure that’s enough.
And the plot by itself wasn’t too exciting – I thought it might be, but ultimately not too much happened, did it? Without spoiling everything, what Mariwen did actually seemed, well, vaguely pointless. This super-surveillance-and-conspiracy-skills a certain faction shows imo were (like the premise) not plausible and lead to everything developing and concluding in a too simplistic fashion, especially the end, which really needed a good twist for fun (like all the various people involved plotting on what they are going to do with/about Kris, and then when they execute their various plans it turns out she actually did something which throws a wrench in everyone’s plans… ^^).
Altogether then a novel I thought was OK but didn’t really do anything much for me. Other things aside, I think at least some of the minor subplots should have been truly advanced to provide some “satisfaction” – like Kris’ mom gets mentioned again, and I’m fairly sure all readers have at least a strong suspicion on who it is anyway. But again, it just stays in the same “well, maybe, maybe not” unresolved area like everything else.
Well, enough ranting for a sunny but way too cold Sunday afternoon 🙂