An Idiot's Review of The Star Stone: Book One of the Darkwinds of Danaria Series

You know, if you've followed this blog for any length of time you know that I love to read. Reading is something that keeps me from murdering my siblings, and outright locking myself away. As such I'm pretty much able to read virtually anything you throw in my face. But you guys should also know that I'm pretty blunt when I talk about what I read. Saying this long and drawn out introduction, I wanted to like this book. I honest to ,whatever god you worship, did. With a name like The Darkwinds of Danaria series, I knew I was going to be in for something interesting. While TA Sullivan clearly has a very active imagination, and is extremely good at naming things, that's pretty much where the fun dies.

So let's start off with our two protagonists. Neerah, a fifteen year old girl, is your average Jane that lives in a tiny village. She can hear the music from the ever mysterious stones she collects, but aside from that she thinks she's normal. However that pretty thought is smashed and burned when a handsome young man kidnaps her and she learns that she's a reincarnated...well to put it simply, dark lord. Whenever Neerah was on the page I usually had two reactions, the dominate one rolling my eyes, and the other was sighing. While I do appreciate she put up a fight on occasions, I felt like it was so short lived that it may as well not even happened. I'm sure she'll get more character development in later books, hopefully, but I just didn't like her character at all. Constantly arguing, constantly whining, making stupid mistakes, it got annoying very quickly.

Our second protagonist is a guy called Joelnar. The interesting thing about him is that he's a half Nix half human creature. And...That's really where the interesting part about him ends. He was very angsty in the book, upset about things that were out of his control, and most of the time was a silent brooding type. Except when he wasn't and was usually snapping at Neerah or trying to deal with her. To be fair I'd be upset with Neerah most of the time too.

Now let's talk about the world. Since this was a high fantasy the world has to be amazingly interesting, right? Well, actually it is sometimes. While I wasn't too fond of calling normal things, like birds, off the wall names like feathered fliers. I did find the world that the Etherals inhabited very interesting, and would have loved it if the entire plot was set in the world. The description for it was wonderful, and the inhabitants a bit unique, almost reminding me of the Farplane in Final Fantasy 10. But once you hit the actual setting, it was just a typical fantasy landscape that reminded me of Western Europe if not Northern America.

The plot is as expected. Normal girl finds out that she's not normal, gets saved by a handsome stranger, they go destroy the plot device of doom. Aside from the fact that everyone wants to kill Neerah for some reason or another, there's no real surprises.

So to sum it all up, I have to say that the story had potential. Some aspects of it was really thrilling and unique like the Etheral world, and the Nixians, but other than that it followed way too many high fantasy tropes making it a pretty boring affair.

If you still want to get the story it can be found here.

Alright, I'm gonna go eat some grits....