ARC Book Review: The Knight and the Moth (The Stonewater Kingdom #1) by Rachel Gillig

May 20, 2025May 13, 2025 GoodeyReads1 Comment

Rating: ★★★★
Audience: Fantasy + Romance
Length: 400 pages
Author: Rachel Gillig
Publisher: Orbit Books
Release Date: May 20th, 2025
Image & Other Reviews on: Goodreads

BOOK SUMMARY:

From BookTok sensation and NYT bestselling author Rachel Gillig, comes the next big romantasy phenomenon: a gothic, mist-cloaked tale of a prophetess who is forced beyond the safety of her cloister on an impossible quest to defeat the gods with the one knight whose future is beyond her sight.

Sybil Delling has spent nine years dreaming of having no dreams at all. Like the other foundling girls who traded a decade of service for a home in the great cathedral, Sybil is a Diviner. In her dreams she receives visions from six unearthly figures known as Omens. From them, she can predict terrible things before they occur, and lords and common folk alike travel across the kingdom of Traum’s windswept moors to learn their futures by her dreams.

Just as she and her sister Diviners near the end of their service, a mysterious knight arrives at the cathedral. Rude, heretical, and devilishly handsome, the knight Rodrick has no respect for Sybil’s visions. But when Sybil’s fellow Diviners begin to vanish one by one, she has no choice but to seek his help in finding them. For the world outside the cathedral’s cloister is wrought with peril. Only the gods have the answers she is seeking, and as much as she’d rather avoid Rodrick’s dark eyes and sharp tongue, only a heretic can defeat a god.

Thank you to Orbit Books for the gifted ARC and LibroFM for the audiobook.

OH WOW.

I loved the journey this book took. I admit it was a bit slow on the uptake for me but once the mystery started I was really invested. I love the way that Gillig writes and the torturous atmosphere created by the depths of the storytelling. It has the feeling of sitting in a medieval bar listening to a bard tell a tale.

The romance was filled with snarky banter and that slow burn vibe I often crave. I loved how the character arc for Sybil wove into the romance and how she grew to stand on her own. I love when characters take in new information and really DO something with it. There’s a lot of adventure with a traveling plot as the secrets of the cloister are ripped to shreds.

Honestly I could have seen this being an amazing standalone but I’m not upset that we get more books in this world. I loved the dark ambiance and characters. OH MY GOSH BARTHOLOMEW. I can’t forget about him. There’s seriously so many little aspects of this story that I can’t get out of my brain. The complicated craft of the world x magic system is like none other.

Overall audience notes:

Fantasy Romance
Language: mild
Romance: open door (2-3 scenes)
Violence: high
Content warnings: drowning (repeatedly), murder, loss of loved ones

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ARC Book Review: The Ashfire King (The Sandsea Trilogy #2) by Chelsea Abdullah

April 15, 2025April 14, 2025 GoodeyReadsLeave a comment

Rating: ★★★★
Audience: Fantasy
Length: 544 pages
Author: Chelsea Abdullah
Publisher: Orbit
Release Date: April 15th, 2025
Image & Other Reviews on: Goodreads

BOOK SUMMARY:

A merchant and a prince trapped in the crumbling realm of jinn must figure out how to save one world to return to their own in The Ashfire King, the second book in the Sandsea Trilogy.

Neither here nor there, but long ago… After fleeing a patricidal prince, legendary merchant Loulie al-Nazari and banished prince Mazen bin Malik find themselves in the realm of jinn. But instead of sanctuary, they find a world on the cusp of collapse.

The jinn cities, long sheltered beneath the Sandsea by the magic of its kings, are sinking. Amid the turmoil, political alliances are forming, and rebellion is on the rise. When Loulie assists a dissenter—one of her bodyguard’s old comrades—she puts herself in the center of a centuries-old war.

Trapped in a world that isn’t her own and wielding magic that belongs to a fallen king, Loulie must decide: Will she carry on someone else’s legacy or carve out her own?

Thank you to Orbit Books for the gifted ARC.

WORTH THE WAIT…MAYBE?

I have been waiting for this book for a LONG TIME. I loved The Stardust Thief and have been waiting to see where all of my favorite characters are up to. Did I love this as much as I hoped? No, unfortunately I didn’t. Definitely enough to read book three, this one was just harder to move through.

Mazen and Loulie are my favorite POV’s and I liked the journey they went on the most. There’s some good turns and rising levels of action as another quest begins. I liked the expansion of the world and magic systems and seeing some of those character arcs really blossoming.

Aisha had a good journey too and it did help set up some of the plot lines for book three. I like that this has complicated antagonists and that it’s hard to trust every person who walks on page.

I think if you enjoyed book one you would still enjoy this book. I think the turn from more action driven rather than character driven took away from some of the moments I was hoping to see turn up.

Overall audience notes:

Fantasy
Language: low
Romance: AN ALMOST KISS
Violence: moderate – high

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ARC Book Review: The Outcast Mage (The Shattered Lands #1) by Annabel Campbell

January 31, 2025January 22, 2025 GoodeyReadsLeave a comment

Rating: ★★★☆
Audience: Fantasy
Length: 512 pages
Author: Annabel Campbell
Publisher: Orbit
Release Date: January 28th, 2025
Image & Other Reviews on: Goodreads

BOOK SUMMARY:

A mage bereft of her powers must find out if she is destined to save the world or destroy it in this glittering debut fantasy perfect for fans of Andrea Stewart, James Islington, and Samantha Shannon.

In the glass city of Amoria, magic is everything. And Naila, student at the city’s legendary academy, is running out of time to prove she can control hers. If she fails, she’ll be forced into exile, relegated to a life of persecution with the other magicless hollows. Or worse, be consumed by her own power.

When a tragic incident further threatens her place at the Academy, Naila is saved by Haelius Akana, the most powerful living mage. Finding Naila a kindred spirit, Haelius stakes his position at the Academy on teaching her to harness her abilities. But Haelius has many enemies, and they would love nothing more than to see Naila fail. Trapped in the deadly schemes of Amoria’s elite, Naila must dig deep to discover the truth of her powers or watch the city she loves descend into civil war.

For there is violence brewing on the wind, and greater powers at work. Ones who could use her powers for good… or destroy everything she’s ever known.

Thank you to Orbit Books for my gifted copy.

NOT EVERYTHING I HOPED.

I was really excited for this book but it ended up not quite being what I hoped for. What I did like was the general concept of the plot. It’s intriguing enough and with multiple POV’s it’s nice to see different angles of the conflicts. The characters were all perfectly fine. And that’s where the problems start to show.

I feel like I got NO character depth. Nobody was truly memorable and everything was surface level. When these big things would happen I would realize that I didn’t care because there had been nothing to tether me to them. And there was no romance (which isn’t a problem, EXCEPT) for when a very out of pocket fade to black scene was thrown in as if it was checking something off of a list.

If I read the second book it would be on audio to help speed it up. I am intrigued, but eh.

Overall audience notes:

Fantasy
Language: low
Romance: one fade to black
Violence: moderate

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Book Review: The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door by H.G. Parry

January 25, 2025January 1, 2025 GoodeyReadsLeave a comment

Rating: ★★★★
Genre: Historical Fantasy
Length: 464 pages
Author: H.G. Parry
Publisher: Orbit Books
Release Date: October 22nd, 2024
Image & Other Reviews on: Goodreads

BOOK SUMMARY:

From the author of The Magician’s Daughter comes The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door, a mythic, magical tale full of secret scholarship, faerie curses, and the deadliest spells of all—the ones that friends cast on each other.

All they needed to break the world was a door, and someone to open it.

Camford, 1920. Gilded and glittering, England’s secret magical academy is no place for Clover, a commoner with neither connections nor magical blood. She tells herself she has fought her way there only to find a cure for her brother Matthew, one of the few survivors of a faerie attack on the battlefields of WWI which left the doors to faerie country sealed, the study of its magic banned, and its victims cursed.

But when Clover catches the eye of golden boy Alden Lennox-Fontaine and his friends, doors that were previously closed to her are flung wide open, and she soon finds herself enmeshed in the seductive world of the country’s magical aristocrats. The summer she spends in Alden’s orbit leaves a fateful mark: months of joyous friendship and mutual study come crashing down when experiments go awry, and old secrets are unearthed.

Years later, when the faerie seals break, Clover knows it’s because of what they did. And she knows that she must seek the help of people she once called friends—and now doesn’t quite know what to call—if there’s any hope of saving the world as they know it.

Thank you to Orbit Books for the gifted ARC.

GREAT READ.

I enjoyed this one a lot and highly recommend the audiobook format for picking it up. I loved the narrator and it had such a great story telling quality that was really engaging from the get go. I loved the plot set-up and watching the slow build of Clover’s character.

The middle did fall off a bit and things dragged around as some of the mundane life aspects were happening without the plot changing. But I liked the complicated dynamic and relationship between all of these college students and how the force of time and circumstances changed everything.

At least the ending brought things back around and I liked how it all came together. It’s a truly solid standalone that wraps up the story lines in a satisfactory way. I admittedly would have loved a little more romance or at least generation of chemistry between one pair but that’s alright.

Overall audience notes: