Jean Lowe Carlson

I got an ARC copy via Instafreebie.

Litha is dying and she knows it all too well for her own father caught a similar ailment and succumbed to a lung disease during the winter. Impoverished and starving, she decides to forgo their last morsels of food and medicine and decides to leave her daughter, son-in-law and grandson behind and stumbles in a feverish rampage to a frozen lake where she occasionally ice skated in her youth.

When she was about to perish, a strange man with white hair, show more stunning icy cold eyes that was elegantly dressed in white rabbit pelts whisks her away...

The story is poetically written with some thoughtful sentences such as this one: "On and on Litha ran through the beautiful death all around her, tucking her chin and setting a hard pace she knew she could not recover from, her breath heaving and rattling in her throat."

I didn't expect the romance at the end of the tale (I didn't read the plot of the book and much less the reviews beforehand). The story isn't exactly my cup of tea which is my biased reason for giving it 3 stars but this book is definitely aimed at readers that are more into Grim fairytale dramas with some romance. show less

I went back and forth on how I felt about this story throughout the whole book. There are many POV characters, and some of them had similar name so this was a tiring aspect to keep track of. Many scenes are just fluff, and don't add to the story, where as many more could have replaced them to fill in more of the backstory on characters who were labeled as important but not given any real weight. Or romances that were rushed that shouldn't have been, etc.

The base story is intriguing, and has show more a lot of potential but the book had a lot of 'first novel' errors that kept drawing me out, all the way to the end with an 'epilogue' that should have just been labeled Chapter 39. The author never uses the dialogue tag 'said'. This was the most taxing error. Friends do not say their friends names inside dialogue when they are speaking to them. The adjective level is high in dialogue scenes, and make it hard to stay engrossed in the action. The characters are constantly murmuring, nodding, sniffing, etc. Just use said.

The world build, and layers of treason are all well crafted, all the way up to the various layers to the kingsmen. At it's core there is a great story here. show less

An exciting addition to book 1 but the bad guys are winning

Everything got resolved. Some of my favorite characters died unfortunately and that reduced my commitment to this story.