Thursday, February 18, 2016

Review: Reign of Shadows by Sophie Jordan

First, thanks to Edelweiss and Harper Teen for the egalley of this. And then I was lucky enough to get a physical ARC through the mail from Harper Teen in a Shelf Awareness giveaway.  Overall the book was good.  I won't say it is one that blew me away.  However it is good enough that I'm going to have to read the sequel to know what happens next to the characters. 

There are two main characters, Luna and Fowler.  The world they live in is a world where the sun never shines.  The year that Luna was born, her parents, the king and queen, were murdered by the man who now sits on the throne.  She was taken by two of her family's servants and has been living in a tower, far away from anyone who might know who she is, in order to keep her safe from this evil man.  Fowler is a boy, about the same age as Luna, who has been out in the Black Woods, trying to survive. When the two meet each other, Luna has just saved Fowler and the two children he is traveling with from the dwellers.  The dwellers are these horrible creatures that live in the ground, and come out and kill.  The problem is that no one can know who Luna is, because she must stay safe from the evil new king.  But when she and Fowler go out to find something needed to help the kid who was hurt, they hear something going on back at the tower.  The king's men have found the tower, and it is only Fowler keeping Luna from running back to save her family that she is not caught. 

The two of them travel through the forest trying to stay ahead of the dweller creatures.  Fowler now knows Luna's secret.  In their travels, to a city that he believes exists and may still have sunlight, Fowler must protect her from the people out searching for her.  And it's so bad now because the king has offered a reward to anyone who kills any girl her age.  They come across people hunting for girls. They also come across some drug types of people, and finally are taken into a community of people living up in trees.  However it was before this that Luna decides she must disguise herself as a boy to be safe. 

We will also learn of some secrets that Fowler has, and at the end, he will even give away a kind of shocking one, that I didn't see coming. 

It was a neat world, but I really needed more.  I needed to know more about the kingdom before, more about so many things.  I can only hope that we can learn that in future books in this series.  The characters were okay, I feel I got a lot from them for the most part.  But I needed a little bit more.  Again that is something I'm hoping for in future books.  This is an author I've read and enjoyed in the past.  So I can only say that I would expect there will be more coming in the future books.