The Azrael Initiative

Best friends Kayla Falk, an engineering student, and Olivia Bellamy, who is studying nursing, are nearing the end of their college career when terrorists attack their university. Through a combination of cleverness, bravery, and luck, the two manage to foil the deadly plot. A mysterious man from the United States government, Mr. Hightower, sees their potential and attempts to recruit Kayla and Olivia for a program to take on ISIS. They initially refuse, but another terrorist attack that strikes close to home pushes them to change their minds and join the Azrael Initiative.

After several months of hard training, the two women are dropped into Al-Raqqah, the capital of ISIS, in Syria. Once there, they must blend in with the locals as they strike from the shadows to kill ISIS leaders, destroy their facilities, and free captives. As Americans deep within enemy territory, they know that they will be killed if discovered. As women, they also know that they would suffer before death. Walking the line between vengeance and justice strains their relationship. As they work to resolve their differences, the symphony of brutality around them ultimately pushes them closer together and forges them into the warriors that they were meant to become.

Read the first three chapters of The Azrael Initiative.

The Azrael Initiative isn't my usual read. I like a bit of fantasy YA and a bit of contemporary YA, but this book falls somewhere in between. It's certainly not fantasy, but it's not exactly contemporary either. Even so, I ended up really enjoying it. The writing style and overly simplistic plot weren't to my tastes (more on that below!) but I loved the strong friendship between Kayla and Olivia that was at the heart of this novel. After a bit of a slow start, the story gets its hooks into you. There are some sections (no spoilers here!) that really hit hard. Both girls are well written and their friendship was the bedrock of the story. Families don't get enough of a look in in a lot of YA books, so the girls' close bond with their families and each others was touching. The book also correctly (imo) posits that family isn't always blood and real family is the people you choose to surround yourself with.

The author deserves kudos for having the nerve to tackle such a thorny subject. It would have been easier to set the book in an alternate world or create a fictional enemy but he didn't take the easy road and I do admire that. However this caused a bit of an issue for me. Kayla and Olivia are basically recruited as child soliders and trained/brainwashed to blindly attack the enemy they're pointed at. Kind of like ISIS then? The problem is, they're guilty of exactly the same thing they're trying to prevent. Their own overseer outright states that "our agents will work to instill fear in ISIS using any means necessary." So, become terrorsits themselves? Kayla deals with terrorists killing her family by going out and killing terrorists, who presumably have families of their own. It's all very black and white, but this story really would have benefited from some shades of grey. One particular scene in which Kayla brutally stabs a suspected terrorist to death before remarking that people "like him" remind her of the people that killed her family, while straddling his still warm corpse, is staggeringly tone deaf.

This book definitely would have benefited from a stricter edit. There are countless surplus paragraphs and information that add nothing to the story that really should have been cut. On the whole though, this book was an entertaining read. Although the execution of the morally complex story wasn't faultless, I admire the author for not taking the easy road and I absolutely loved the strong female friendship between Kayla and Olivia.

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About the Author

K lives in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where he works as a software developer. In his spare time, when he isn’t writing, he enjoys reading, working out, playing video games, and spending time with his wonderful fiancee, Bobbi. Some of his favorite authors are Tom Clancy, George R. R. Martin, and Sarah Maas.

Author Links:

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Reign of Mist

The realm’s darkest secret is out. 

The cruelty of the capital and the power-hungry King Arden have scattered Bleak and her companions across the continents.

On the run in a foreign land, Bleak finds herself tied to some unexpected strangers. When the answers she yearns for are finally within reach, she must face the hard truths of her past, and take her fate into her own hands before it’s too late.

Meanwhile, secrets and magic unravel as a dark power corrupts the realm. Bleak’s friends are forced to decide where their loyalties lie, and who, if anyone, they can trust.

But one thing is certain: war is coming, and they must all be ready when it does.

Disclaimer: I was given a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I read a lot of YA fantasy debuts last year, but Heart of Mist was easily one of the best. Would Reign of Mist live up to its predecessor? Or would it suffer the dreaded sophomore slump? Reign doesn’t meet the high bar set by Heart, it hurtles over it with room to spare. It has everything I want in a book. I like believably-written, badass female characters, I like despicable villains (don't try to change me), I like political intrigue and natural world-building, and this book has all of those things turned up to 11.

After the events of the last book, Bleak and her allies are scattered. Hanging plot threads need to be tied up and new ones woven in, all the while establishing history, powers and alliances that would rival an episode of Game of Thrones. Helen Scheurer weaves together multiple povs and casts her storytelling net wide, bringing together characters and history from all over the realm. Just like Heart of Mist, she gets the showing and telling balance absolutely perfect. With new characters introduced, history to be revealed and secrets brought to light, a less skilled author might have resorted to pages of exposition or characters sat around reciting the plot, but not so here. I couldn’t even pinpoint where I found out about certain characters or events. They were woven so naturally into the story that when they became relevant to the plot, I already knew everything I needed to without the action screeching to a halt so one of the characters could exposit key informaton. The best books do this, and Reign of Mist does it well.

Henri, my favourite character from book one, gets an even meatier role this time around. She’s a total badass, complete with leathers and knives, but the vulnerable side we saw glimpses of in the last book comes to the fore. I’ll keep this review spoiler free but suffice to say we see plenty of emotion alongside the bloodletting. In a book of so many fierce women it would have been easy for some of them to read like clones of each other, but everyone had their own voice. Each character was clearly shaped by their past and it showed in every line of dialogue.

Bleak’s path in the story may be a tad predictable, but the author still manages to put a different spin on it thanks to the unique structure of Oremere’s rulers. Her battle with her addiction to alcohol was one of the best parts of the last book. Not because I particularly like reading character’s suffering, but because it was a refreshingly honest look at the harsh and unpretty reality of drinking yourself into oblivion on a daily basis. 

It would be easy for this plot point to have been discarded after it served its purpose in HoM, but that doesn’t happen here. I loved Bleak’s character development and how she fought tooth and nail to stay alive even when she’d been absolutely battered. Her "will they, won't they" relationship with Bren was superbly handled too. One of the things I love most about Helen Scheurer's stories is that she puts a fresh spin on all the YA tropes she uses and Bleak's complicated back and forth with her salt-of-the-earth childhood friend is no exception. I'll admit, I wasn't sold on these two in book one, but the way they work out in this book is note perfect. Believable and bittersweet.

As with any book that deals in multiple povs, there were a couple I found less than enthralling. Captain Swinton’s were easily my least favourite. Perhaps because the character is such an uptight buzzkill I didn’t find much to enjoy in his chapters outside of the plot developments. Although his chapters did give a glimpse of the adorable couple Olena and Nazuri. Theirs may have been a political match rather than a romantic one, but they were a pairing to rival even my OTP of this series, Henri and Athene.

I won’t spoil the ending except for to say; really Helen Scherer? You’re going to leave me like this?! HoM ended on one hell of a cliff hanger and after some breakneck-paced chapters, RoM does the same thing. That ending though! Just like last time, there are new players in the game, new threats and whole new worlds that need to be explored. And, just like last time, I have to wait for them!

Glass Sword

Mare Barrow’s blood is red—the color of common folk—but her Silver ability, the power to control lightning, has turned her into a weapon that the royal court tries to control. The crown calls her an impossibility, a fake, but as she makes her escape from Maven, the prince—the friend—who betrayed her, Mare uncovers something startling: she is not the only one of her kind.

Pursued by Maven, now a vindictive king, Mare sets out to find and recruit other Red-and-Silver fighters to join in the struggle against her oppressors. But Mare finds herself on a deadly path, at risk of becoming exactly the kind of monster she is trying to defeat. Will she shatter under the weight of the lives that are the cost of rebellion? Or have treachery and betrayal hardened her forever?

The electrifying next installment in the Red Queen series escalates the struggle between the growing rebel army and the blood-segregated world they’ve always known—and pits Mare against the darkness that has grown in her soul.

DNF 40%

After Red Queen left me equal parts disappointed (by the lack of originality) and incredulous (also at the lack of originality), I should have handed this series back to the person who passed it to me like some sort of ancient curse. However, needs must when you’re staying in a remote cabin with no wi-fi and five tv channels, so I decided to give book two a crack. Hey, it could only be up from the bottom, right?

Wrong.

Christ on a bike, where to start with this book? I – and I’m sure many others – noted the … *ahem* similarities to The Hunger Games in Red Queen. Perhaps I was just still in that mindset, but opening this book with our recently rescued heroine and the rebellion fleeing from the powers that be, complete with bomb-dropping fighter jets and a desperate flee through a city that was long thought abandoned due to nuclear radiation? Seriously!? Just like the fact there are only so many chords some songs are going to sound the same, I get that there only so many plot points and some books are going to have similar elements. But when there are so many scenes that feel like they were cut and pasted from one book to another I can’t get then get fully engaged with a story because half my mind is thinking about another one.

What I read of the plot of Glass Sword was all but non-existent. Mare and her allies search Norta etc for other so-called New Bloods. They find one, we get a brief intro of their powers like that god-awful scene in X-Men 3 where Mystique literally reads character bios to Magneto, then they move on while trying to avoid Maven’s forces. That … seemed to be it. Oh, aside from Mare’s constant sulking and brooding of course. And her painfully contrived insistence on referring to herself as the Lightning Girl every five seconds. If Red Queen’s drinking games – Hunger Games rip-offs and YA tropes – could have killed you through alcohol poisoning, just imagine taking a drink every time the words “Lightning Girl” cursed the pages.

As with Red Queen, this book may be derivative and predictable but it also incredibly well written. I don’t care for the story or the characters (in case my reviews didn’t make that clear!) but I’d be tempted to pick up something else written by this author because, if the plot was more original, I imagine she can tell one hell of a story.

Eventually though, when it became clear that all my issues with Red Queen were still present and correct in the sequel, I gave up and binned off books three and four. I don’t know why I expected this one to be any better than its predecessor, but I have no one to blame but myself for wasting my time on it.

 

Red Queen

This is a world divided by blood - red or silver. The Reds are commoners, ruled by a Silver elite in possession of god-like superpowers. And to Mare Barrow, a seventeen-year-old Red girl from the poverty-stricken Stilts, it seems like nothing will ever change. That is until she finds herself working in the Silver Palace. Here, surrounded by the people she hates the most, Mare discovers that, despite her red blood, she possesses a deadly power of her own. One that threatens to destroy the balance of power. Fearful of Mare's potential, the Silvers hide her in plain view, declaring her a long-lost Silver princess, now engaged to a Silver prince. Despite knowing that one misstep would mean her death, Mare works silently to help the Red Guard, a militant resistance group, and bring down the Silver regime. But this is a world of betrayal and lies, and Mare has entered a dangerous dance - Reds against Silvers, prince against prince, and Mare against her own heart.

When my friend deposited this quadrilogy in my lap, declaring it utter trash but something I’d probably love, I was torn. On the one had; free books. On the other hand; what exactly was she saying about my tastes? I’ve heard plenty about the Red Queen series over the years (who in the YA blogging community hasn’t?) but had never got around to picking it up. Something about the blurbs always turned me off. They were too neat; hitting all the “bestseller” selling points and offering very little else. Still, free books are free books and I had a week’s trip to a remote Scottish island coming up, so I packed the books and dove in.

And was immediately glad I didn’t spend my hard-earned money on them.

I read somewhere that the author of Red Queen wanted to write “the next big YA series”. That to me is a pretty damning indictment of this book, and it shows on every page. There’s no heart, no passion in the story. Everything is cold, calculating and cynical. Everything YA trope is ticked off the list and every plot development can be seen coming a mile away because you’ve read it before in other (dare I say better?) books. You could play a YA trope bingo drinking game with this book, but you’d be dead from alcohol poisoning by the half way mark. I kid you not; you would actually die. The story itself is essentially The Hunger Games with X-Men powers. The first quarter or so of the book apes The Hunger Games so blatantly I’m amazed this was published without having some of the more glaringly obvious “similarities” edited out first. Surely I can't be the only one who felt this!?

My main issue with this book was the protagonist, Mare. Mare has it tough. She’s part of an oppressed underclass ruled by a rich and powerful city. A “capital”, if you will. Alongside her salt of the earth best friend and possible love interest, Gale Kilorn, she survives in her … let’s call it a district … by thieving and scavenging to feed her beloved family, especially her sheltered little sister. She dreams of running away to avoid what seems to be her inevitable, miserable end in life, but won’t abandon her family. After a few twists of fate, she ends up whisked away to the capital (with an "a"), a world of material excess, political intrigue and hot guys vying for her attention while she has to play up to the role created for her in order to save her skin and those of the people she loves. Oh, and then she becomes the face of an underground rebellion looking to use her as a pawn in their own machinations. 

Mare also complains. A lot. A secondary bingo drinking game, where you take a shot every time she sulks, whines or monologues about how unfair everything is, would see you dead from liver failure before you got through chapter three. Even when she’s been taken from her pitiful existence and taken to palace to be passed off as a long lost royal – even though this plan of action creates more problems for the evil king and queen than it solves – she doesn’t stop feeling sorry for herself. Sure, it’s not an ideal situation, but it’s a hell of a lot better than what she had going on before and puts her in a position to help a lot more people. If she quit feeling sorry for herself and chose to make the best of a situation, but that doesn’t appear to be her style.

In the desperation to make Mare the new Katniss, this book completely misses what made Katniss such a fantastic and relatable character in the first place. She wasn’t a unique snowflake who just needed to stumble ass-backwards into a situation where people would finally discover how special she was. She was just a normal girl who made rash decisions, and then had to live with the consequences of those decisions. Mare is not that. She’s the most special of all the superpowered people in this book, she just needed someone (a hot prince, of course) to discover just how incredible and special she is. Did I mention that she’s special? Everything she does is at the insistence or orders of other people. When she does finally make a decision off her own back by joining the rebellion, she makes a mistake so stupid I can’t believe it was passed off as a twist ending.

All the other characters are pretty standard across the board, with the two love triangle angles Cal and Maven coming off as bland at best and horribly calculated at worst. Cal in particular fell totally flat, with barely a defining characteristic to be found. His "romance" with Mare had absolutely zero heat, despite the obligatory learning to dance scene, and although his love/hate relationship wth brother Maven fared a little better, it was forced to take a backseat to the love triangle. Evangeline was your standard beautiful mean-girl who hated our protagonist because she was getting in her way of the men (apparently this is revealed not to be the case in later books, but I didn’t see much else here). The evil queen was evil. The puppet king was a puppet. The book was full of overly flowery prose that screams of an author writing her “profound” quotes first and then jamming them into the manuscript. If you’re not sure what lines are supposed to be quotable, don’t worry. They’ll often be italicised, lest we readers not know what to add to the Goodreads quotes section.

I give this book two stars instead of one because it was a very well written story and it's obvious that Victoria Aveyard is one hell of an author. Structure, pacing, writing style, all were top notch. Contrary to my friend's warning this book may be many things but it is not trash. If I felt like this author was telling her own story, writing from the heart, I probably would be giving this book raves. However the whole thing felt like a calculated exercise in producing a bestseller. If someone programmed a robot to write “the next big YA series”, Red Queen would be what it spat out. And, fair play, it was a success in that respect. But strip away the hype and the awards and you’re left with a basic book, and not a very original one at that.

The Cruel Prince

Jude was seven years old when her parents were murdered and she and her two sisters were stolen away to live in the treacherous High Court of Faerie. Ten years later, Jude wants nothing more than to belong there, despite her mortality. But many of the fey despise humans. Especially Prince Cardan, the youngest and wickedest son of the High King.

To win a place at the Court, she must defy him–and face the consequences.

In doing so, she becomes embroiled in palace intrigues and deceptions, discovering her own capacity for bloodshed. But as civil war threatens to drown the Courts of Faerie in violence, Jude will need to risk her life in a dangerous alliance to save her sisters, and Faerie itself. 


DNF 70%

I was expecting to love this book. I really was. I’d head nothing but good things and was eagerly awaiting my copy weeks ahead of the delivery date. And I couldn’t finished it. I forced myself to keep reading despite putting in down countless times with no real desire to pick it up again until, finally, I gave up. Don’t get me wrong. The Cruel Prince is not a bad book (you only have to read the numerous glowing reviews to see that), but I found it an absolute crushing bore.

After being stolen from the human realm by her parent’s killer, Jude and her sisters grew up in the fairy realm under the roof of father-figure/parent-killer Madoc. Jude is desperate to be accepted by the fair folk, and when it becomes apparent that she never will be, she turns her attention to being better than them and winning a place as knight of the court. While all this plays out, she’s tormented by the titular cruel prince Carden and his gang of sidekicks. And this is my problem with the story. It’s juvenile in the extreme. Much of it revolves around Jude being cornered and bullied by Carden like a less satirical version of Mean Girls.

Seriously, this is pure high school drama. Sure, the fair folk’s magic gives these encounters a neat twist – like force-feeding Jude magical fruit that makes her incredibly suggestible – but this stuff felt a bit too cynically targeted at young people who go through severe bullying. Jude is presented to the reader as a capable, determined girl, but over and over again all I saw was a bitter, emotionally damaged girl who hates the popular kids while longing to be one. I didn’t connect with her at all, and so had little to no interest in her story.

On top of that, Jude's sort-of attraction to Carden was skin-crawlingly creepy. Hate-to-love is one thing, but portraying Carden as Jude's abuser, only to hint that she was attracted to him as a result, was beyond poor taste. I do not lie when I say these scenes genuinely left me feeling queasy. I was kind of confused as to why Jude was so comfortable living under Madoc's roof and protection too. She saw this guy murder her parents and she apparently harbours him no ill will beyond getting stroppy when he won't let her train to become a knight. She's about ready to kill Carden for cruel taunts, but apparently straight up murdering her parents before her eyes gets you nothing more than a side eye every once in a while.

I give this book two stars because it is incredibly imaginative and well-written. And if I was still in high school, maybe this book would resonate more with me, but I found the basis of the story to be in such poor taste that it soured the whole thing for me. Maybe the book picks up in the final act that makes the preceding 70% of Jude's suffering and misery worth it, but by that point I didn't care enough to find out.
 

Sunburner

No one said being queen was easy...

Kai, the newly-crowned queen of Miina, finds her reign threatened by a plague of natural disasters that leave death and destruction in their wake. Are the gods truly angry at the peace between the moon and sunburners, or is something more sinister to blame? Kai's throne and her very life may be forfeit unless she can appease the gods' anger and her peoples' superstitions.

Determined to find a solution, Kai and the Sunburner Prince Hiro embark on an extraordinary and dangerous journey to discover the true cause of the plagues. What they find is an ancient enemy determined to plunge their world into eternal darkness — and one desperate chance to save it.

Sunburner picks up a short time after Moonburner left off. Kai has taken her place as queen, with Hiro as her side, but the sinister prophecy about her rule looks to be coming true. Famine and disease are taking their toll on her people, and it seems the gods themselves aren’t happy with the alliance she’s forged with her old enemies.

Kai and Hiro’s relationship was all but absent from Moonburner. It was an unusual tactic from the author, but it worked. Keeping their romance on the backburner while they dealt with bigger issues made it feel genuine, rather than a shallow infatuation. Now, we finally get to see them together. And what a pairing. I loved seeing Hiro content to take Kai’s side without having to constantly prove his macho credentials. There was no possessive behaviour, no putting her in her place to make himself look like a big man. Theirs was at true partnership, and it showed.

It was a bit of a shame that Kai's relationship her sensei-esque fox Quitsu was a bit surplus to requirements this time around. With Hiro in the picture as Kai's confidant and supporter, Quitsu could have been left out in the cold, but the author managed to keep him in the story and maintain his close relationship with Kai without him feeling like a third wheel. Kai herself was easily one of the best things about this story, keeping it grounded as the odds became increasingly stacked against her. One of my pet peeves in YA fantasy - as much as I love it - are 'sassy' protagonists. I say sassy in inverted commas because, more often than not, I read them as rude, insufferable and arrogant. So it was wonderful to read a strong-willed, fiercely determined character who didn't once insult anyone, threaten them with violence if she didn't get her way or throw a tantrum when someone didn't show her proper respect.

Kai’s best friend Emi was back in Sunburner, much to my delight! This straight-talking, take-no-shit moonburner was one of my favourite characters in the last book. Her burgeoning relationship with bitter sunburner Daarco felt a bit trite at first, but the messages of forgiveness and growth that played out through it made it worthwhile. I had to love Emi putting the arrogant Daarco in his place time and time again!

The story itself – of an age-old war between gods and demons playing out to the detriment of the innocent humans that are caught up in its effects – felt like a huge step up from Moonburner. That’s not to say there was anything wrong with the first book’s story, it’s just that this felt like everything great from that book, turned up to 11. The stakes were higher, the world bigger and the consequences more severe. I loved the idea of the gods being somewhat weak and ineffective. It makes sense of course – they’d relied on the Burners they’d created to fight for and defend them – and was a great twist on the usual trope of the protagonist racing to raise an all-powerful being or uncover a magical MacGuffin to save the day, leaving the characters themselves in the dust. These characters weren’t going to be saved. They had to save themselves.

As for the ending … well, I won’t spoil anything, but it was absolutely note perfect. The story is wrapped up and the characters have come full circle, although the door is open for new stories in this world. And I, for one, will be snapping up any sequels.