Monday, August 11, 2014

Review: Blades of the Old Empire (Book One in the Majat Code) by Anna Kashina

Genre: Fantasy
Publisher: Angry Robot
Published: February 25, 2014
Pages: 476
Source: I won this book from Goodreads book giveaways (First-reads)
Synopsis: Kara is a mercenary – a Diamond warrior, the best of the best, and a member of the notorious Majat Guild. When her tenure as protector to Prince Kythar comes to an end, custom dictates he accompany her back to her Guild to negotiate her continued protection.

But when they arrive they discover that the Prince’s sworn enemy, the Kaddim, have already paid the Guild to engage her services – to capture and hand over Kythar, himself.

A warrior brought up to respect both duty and honour, what happens when her sworn duty proves dishonourable?


Review:

The first thing that made me want to read this book was the cover. This cover looks awesome but past that I checked out the summary. After reading the summary I was highly intrigued. I ended up giving this a 4 out of 5 stars on Goodreads. 

One of the things that you notice right away is that you don't see Kara's point of view. You get to know her through the other character in the book. So it does jump point of views, the two main point of views are Kythar and Ellah. There are a few other ones but those are the two main ones you get to see. It was interesting seeing the main character from others eyes so to speak. At first this bothered me because I wanted to know what she was thinking or what was going on through her mind while everything was taking place. 

More recently I read another book called The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. In this book the same thing happens where the main characters story is told through someone else's point of view. I think compared to The Great Gatsby this was done a whole lot better. This wasn't confusing at all when it came to knowing from who's point of view you were reading. So even though it was done differently it was still done very well. 

Now this story does kind of mention a previous one that took place before this book. I really want to mention you do not need to read that story to understand this one. Anna Kashina took down The First Sword, and might possibly be redoing it. I still really want to hear about there adventures before this book and hope she does some day re-publish it. The author does a really good job filling in the blanks from that story so it isn't all that necessary. 

Overall I loved the fight scenes and I definitely want to know more about Kythar's step brother and mother earth more. I loved how mother earth was described and it's kind of  creepy to think of spiders being all over someone to continually make them a dress. *shuddders* . I can't wait to see what sort of trouble all of these characters get into in the next book.

The second book that just came out this month called The Guild of Assassins. Now in this book as I have heard you do get to finally see Kara's point of view. So I am very excited to get to this book and finally get to delve into her brain a little. I know the main character in this book will be Mai who I also liked from the first book though not at first. He was a bit harder to read and like at the beginning of the book, I thought for the most part he was just playing around or just being mean to Ellah but in the end I don't think he meant harm from it. Hopefully we will see a bit more about him and his character in the next book that will make him not so mysterious. 

If you would like more information on The Majat Code books or even on Anna Kashina herself you can go to her blog : http://annakashinablog.wordpress.com/ and learn more there. 

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