taken from Goodreads:
"At the age of nine, Finnikin is warned by the gods that he must
sacrifice a pound of flesh in order to save the royal house of his
homeland, Lumatere.
And so he stands on the rock of three wonders with his childhood
friend Prince Balthazar and the prince's cousin, Lucian, and together
they mix their blood. And Lumatere is safe.
Until the 'five days of the unspeakable', when the King and Queen
and their children are slaughtered in the palace. And an imposter king
takes the throne.
And a curse is put on Lumatere, which traps those caught inside
and forces thousands of others to roam the land as exiles, dying of
fever and persecution in foreign camps.
But ten years later Finnikin is led to another rock to meet the
young novice, Evanjalin. A girl plagued by dark dreams, who holds the
key to their return to the Land of light..."
When I heard that one of my most favorite YA authors of all time was writing a new book, I was just ecstatic. But then I heard that it was a fantasy novel. Hmmmm....this had the potential to be one of the coolest things ever, or it could be a complete and total failure.
Luckily, the things that make Marchetta such an amazing realistic fiction writer also set her up for success is any other genre, because the key to her novels are the characters, and she definitely doesn't fall short here. Finnikin and Evanjalin are complex and real, and their relationship just completely pulls you into the novel, to the point that the fantasy background is secondary to what's going on with the characters. Sometimes invented lands and languages and everything that goes along with them have to almost become like another character in the novel, partly because everything is so unfamiliar. But that doesn't happen here, and you realize that this novel could just as easily have been set a historical fiction piece, rather than an epic fantasy.
It's a gripping read, and I highly recommend it to fantasy and YA lovers alike.
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