5⭐️2🌶 I finished the ARC of Starfire's Heir last night. It was so good! It has everything a good epic fantasy should have. Lexa is just a regular girl living in a small village, minding her own business when she decides to step across the border of her small town. She feels something shift inside her body and the world as she knows it. She races back home to find a stranger talking with her grandmother, the only family she has; the woman who raised her. Well, Lexa is the lost princess to a kingdom inside the Veil and she has powerful magic and is destined to save her people; there's a prophesy and everything. The man in her kitchen is her Champion, Griff, and he's been searching for her for years. Her grandmother had warded the village and when Lexa stepped across the border Griff, was able to sense her and came immediately to take her "home". At her grandmother's insistence she reluctantly goes with Griff. Griff i...
4.5 ⭐️ I just finished To Drown Among the Stars by L.K. Frost. It was a really good palate cleanser after A Ballad for the Broken. It was a nice quick read at under 300 pages. The main character is male. Bastian has failed his trail to become a knight. He's been training all his life to become a knight. He takes some time to get his head right. He decides to take leave and travel alone by foot back to the Capitol city. On his journey he encounters a ransacked fishing village and a deaf Yvri healer named Ulla. He also discovers that something larger is afoot. Ulla travels with him and they quickly form a bond. Bastian, because of his failure, deals with feelings of inadequacy and thinks he isn't good enough for her. He spends most of the book denying whats right in front of him. Truth be told, I think that dragged on a bit much, but there is also some racism going on between the multiple species typ...