【 AIR AWAKENS 】

book #1 in the Air Awakens series

Genre: Fantasy (high)
Audience: Young Adult
Author: Elise Kova
Published: August 2015
Publisher: Silver Wing Press
Pages: 342 (paperback)

This was fun and more or less everything I expected it to be. I’ve been wanting to read this series for such a long time and finally managed to get my hands on it in the form of an audiobook.

I will say, the audiobook sucks. The narrator does a very wooden and lifeless performance of the story, and my enjoyment of the book suffered greatly for it. However, as I got all 5 books in a deal through Audible and this is virtually unavailable (in Australia) in other forms (at a reasonable price and don’t even talk to me about my local library’s selection LAWD), I’m soldiering on.

Bad narration aside, I was able to enjoy the story. Book one feels like it’s setting us up for an epic saga and certainly the very last line of the book packs a punch and has me super excited to dive right into the next one. Who doesn’t love a fantasy world based around elemental magic?! Sometimes nothing beats the simplicity of magic that embraces the basic elemental variety and doesn’t overcomplicate anything. Plus air is just always the coolest, right?

The romance was goooood. In the wake of the romantasy boom, this was a breath of fresh – the romance is the normal kind of sizzling, tension-driven romance you get in most YA books (and TBH, I’ll never understand why people thought romance was lacking prior to romantasy…) and it’s just a good one you can get behind. Good girl meets dark and mysterious boy? Yes, please. No overegged sex scenes or mooning so much that it waylays the plot. We got plot in spades and sexual tension aplenty.

I’m so happy that after years of eyeing this off, I did in fact like it (what a relief, also what a relief seeing as I already have the next 4). And I’m ready to totally fall in love with the series in the hopes that it just gets better and better (though I hold no such hopes for the audiobook narration, alas).

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Title: Air Awakens
Series: Air Awakens #1
Author: Elise Kova
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A library apprentice, a sorcerer prince, and an unbreakable magic bond…

The Solaris Empire is one conquest away from uniting the continent, and the rare elemental magic sleeping in seventeen-year-old library apprentice Vhalla Yarl could shift the tides of war.

Vhalla has always been taught to fear the Tower of Sorcerers, a mysterious magic society, and has been happy in her quiet world of books. But after she unknowingly saves the life of one of the most powerful sorcerers of them all—the Crown Prince Aldrik—she finds herself enticed into his world.

Now she must decide her future: Embrace her sorcery and leave the life she’s known, or eradicate her magic and remain as she’s always been. And with powerful forces lurking in the shadows, Vhalla’s indecision could cost her more than she ever imagined.