It was awesome, go buy it.Why are you still here? Go go now! Go buy and read it?Have you read it yet? Then what are you doing here? Get reading! Never mind sleep, read, people, read. What, you haven’t read the previous books? Go read them too!Ok, now I’m assuming you’ve read it, you’re allowed a brief diversion before reading it a second time.I can’t even begin to recap this – so much happens and to truly grasp it I’d have to spoil which would be a crime. Kara enters the demon world, finds out so much she knew was wrong, discovers a whole new reality, discovers so much more about her magic – and a lot more about the Lords, who she can trust and who she can’t. There are many twists in that, some awesome world building, a great plot and some excellent characters.There was so much to love here. Kara is plunged into the demon world where everything is so different yet so similar to Earth. The lands and settings are described beautifully, enough information to get a true sense of the place while at the same time not drowning us in unnecessary detail or pages and pages of over the top description. I just loved the setting here and how it, in turn helped describe the demons, the different forms, their lives, the way they behave (like the demon snowball fight – which was awesome) without needing to create Wikipedia articles about each kind. We got all the information about them and them much more filled out by these events and daily behaviour than ever we could through dry lectures.And info dumping was always going to be a risk here. Kara arrives on this brand new world, she’s surrounded by every kind of demon and she discovers that a lot of what she (and other demon summoners) thought they knew about the demons and the demon world was laughably wrong (I loved that as well, how her old knowledge wasn’t infallible). Then we’ve got to learn about the 11 demon lords, what actually happened to Szerin, the past cataclysm that nearly destroyed the world, the blades, this alien force, the groves not to mention Kara studying bran new forms of summoning and using symbols.There was a lot of information there and none of it was dumped. Of course some was lectured in a teaching situation but it was all really well balanced. The pacing was excellent, events prevented us having long screeds of info. When Kara is traumatised it is presented respectfully without Kara getting over it over night and without endlessly melodramatic pages of angst and navel gazing – and she has ongoing issues, especially about trust and her appearance, that stem from that. It’s a very natural, very real presentation of her as a survivor and, again, is balanced perfectly with the plot and the world building and the exploration to prevent us having pages and pages of repetition or dry exposition that just drags. Kara doesn’t trust people around her, for obvious reasons, but it never reaches a point of foolishness or the whole plot scuppering over Kara failing to see the obvious out of sheer mistrust – even though it takes a long time to ever gain her full trust. Again, an excellent and real balance.Read More
