Shattered Kingdom by Angelina J. Steffort - Series Review

Series Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Books in the Series:

• Shattered Kingdom

• Wicked Crown

• Shadow Rule

• Lost Towers

• Secret Court

• Dark Refuge

• Reborn Throne

Best Book: Shadow Rule (Book 3)

Genre: New Adult Fantasy

Spice: Hot

Summary:

When Gandrett was young, she was taken from her family in Sives to serve the Goddess Vala at the priory of the Order of Vala in the middle of the Calma Desert. The Vala-blessed serve the Goddess by training to use their water magic, but Gandrett doesn’t have any magic. For the past ten years she’s been trained in the art of hand-to-hand combat and has been dubbed Vala’s Blade because she’s beaten every other person at the Priory. Her and her friends, Surel and Kaleb, can’t wait to leave the priory when they come of age, but Gandrett especially because of the brutal training techniques utilized by the leader of the priory, the Meister, to forge her into Vala’s Blade.

One afternoon, while running outside the priory’s walls, Gandrett encounters a stranger, and defeats him in a sword fight. The stranger, Nehelon, claims he’s a friend of the Meister, and offers her a temporary reprieve from the priory if she works for him to accomplish a mysterious mission. Gandrett is mulling over her decision when she finds out Nehelon is Fae, a magically powerful race of people that haven’t been seen in hundreds of years. From their first interaction, Nehelon plays his cards close to his chest, and now he’s using her fear of the Fae to force her into going with him. So, the two set off for Gandrett’s homeland Sives, where an insidious evil is spreading.

Gandrett and Nehelon will need to develop more than just fighting skills and rely on a cast of characters they meet on their travels to defeat a powerful villain and save Neredyn.

Reaction:

The Shattered Kingdoms is a complete 7-book Coming-of-Age fantasy series with action, slow-burn romance, and political intrigue. The books are filled with magic, dragons, deities, and other unique creatures. They are narrated from multiple POVs, but much of the story is told from the POVs of Gandrett and Nehelon. Overall, I enjoyed this series for the slow-burn star-crossed romances and the plot, which had a lot of twists and turns I didn’t see coming. I labeled this series as New Adult and Hot on the spice scale because as the books progress, there are some spicy scenes (mostly books 6 & 7), and since it’s a coming-of-age series, the FMC, Gandrett, does transition from a young adult into an adult.

This series is much like other sweeping fantasies, where the first book on its own can seem a bit pedestrian, but when you read the entire series, you see book 1 is really focused on setting up the main plotlines of the following books. I really enjoyed books 2, 3, and 4 as I felt there was a balanced mix of fighting, politics, and romance. I enjoyed the multiple plotlines and romances that were somewhat intertwined. My favorite book was Book 3, Shadow Rule. In this book, there are three parallel women’s POVs where they all felt trapped in different ways and presented a varied look at how they coped. The last few books were a little harder for me to get through. I felt that the plot and romance became less relevant, and the focus was on war and/or torture. I especially remember a stretch of time in the last book where it was just war, torture, war, torture, war and I was really struggling to finish reading it. Throughout the series there are a few times the writing was a bit confusing, where it impacted the flow of my reading, but didn’t impact my enjoyment of the series. Overall, a solid coming-of-age fantasy series that I would recommend if you enjoy immersing yourself in a unique world with multiple plotlines that build up to an epic war against evil.