Jacquelyn Sylvan

Reviewed by Candace Cunard for TeensReadToo.com

June has faced her fair share of hardships in life, including the death of her parents, but when this story starts, life is going pretty well. Her best friends are taking her out to celebrate her twenty-first birthday, and although her hardworking fiance is gone on business, he's just a phone call away. Everything seems perfect, until she comes home from a night out with the girls to discover a man dressed in strange clothes standing in her living room - a man who transports her to a world she can't remember, a world he tells her was once her home.

According to Halryan, June is the lost princess and powerful sorcerer of the kingdom Prendawr on the planet Thallafrith. Within a few short hours, she learns that her parents were not really her parents, and that her appearance itself has changed since she has returned "home."

June also learns that she's the only one who can engage in a quest to save the kingdom and the rest of the world from destruction by the insidious Eid Gomen, strange and menacing inhuman creatures with powerful control over magic and the ability to suck a world's life-force out of it if they are left unchecked. The only problem is that nobody asked June if she wanted the job of saving a world she's never really known.

After much explaining and convincing, June decides to go along with Halryan and his four companions, blue-skinned men from a race known as the Valforte, but that doesn't mean she has to be happy about it, and she's not the sort to keep quiet about something that's bothering her. Her no-nonsense attitude was sometimes frustrating, sometimes endearing, but always refreshing: here is a woman who takes things as she sees them, who has both the stubbornness to stand her ground and the grace to admit it when she might have been wrong.

For me, the personal turmoil caused by the events she must go through was the core of the story; the typical fantasy quest plot paled in comparison (although Sylvan puts a nice twist on the typical quest that I certainly didn't expect).

I also enjoyed Sylvan's portrayal of June's Valforte companions. Each of the four men gained a personality of his own, and whether they served the role of antagonist, helpmeet, informer, foil, teacher, or love interest, they played important roles in the story while still seeming like real people. I also appreciated the way that Sylvan dealt with racial tension between the Valfortes and the majority race of Andrians, instead of ignoring the potential for such conflict as many watered-down fantasies do.

While the start was a little slow for me, by the time I got through the first few chapters I was interested enough in the characters and their interactions to keep going. When the author dropped a bomb about a hundred pages in, I felt entirely justified in the impulses that had led me to read so far. Although this book follows a lot of genre cliches, it twisted enough of them in just the right ways to make this an interesting and believable read.

I'd recommend it to anyone interested in fantasy, but also to anyone who appreciates characters who prove their strength in the face of great obstacles.… (más)