Summary:
“The idyllic kingdom of Parisia sat nuzzled securely in the Great Emerald Mountains. For generations Parisia had known nothing but peace and prosperity. When the elder dragon Darka Mors, steals the Darkstone, the entire realm is threatened. Without the Darkstone, the magic sealing away the Shadow King would fail. His return would bring death and destruction to the world of men.
Desperate, the king of Parisia calls on an unlikely hero, the Disgraced Knight Vale Lox to lead a group of Seekers on the most important quest in a thousand years.To save the realm and everyone they have ever known from the rising shadows of darkness, these misfits must survive hostile lands, enemy armies, unspeakable monsters, and each other in order to retrieve the stone from the dragon’s lair before it’s too late.” ~ Goodreads.com
My Thoughts:
4.5 ⭐ Thank you so much to the author for providing me with a review copy of this book!! All thoughts/opinions are my own.
So…I loved this! It’s the first time an author has every reached out and gifted me with an arc in exchange for an honest review so I was super excited. However, me and fantasy books have had a love/hate relationship lately and I was a bit skeptical whether a 450 page high fantasy novel would be able to hold my attention. The fact that I was captivated the whole way through is a sure testament to how much I enjoyed it!
I would say that this is high fantasy at its finest. The pacing was spot-on with twists and turns on every page that converged brilliantly into the book’s epic climax. The characters were so much fun to read about with the dialogue being on-point! I also really liked their consistency and how each one had remarkable growth that was revealed in a quiet way through their actions as the story built and progressed. This is not an easy thing to do and it was even more impressive to me that the author was able to achieve this affect with such a large cast!
There were a couple times I did get a bit lost because of just how many characters there were in play at certain moments and the world-building as well could get a bit tricky to follow what with the different realms, creatures, types of magic, etc. But that said, it makes me excited to read more from this world as there is still so much to be explored! The made up curse-words did give me a laugh when I first started this book but they definitely grew on me and I appreciate the author wanting to keep the language clean!
Overall, this book was such a nice surprise and the perfect read for over the holidays. There was not a single dull moment and it always left me ready to come back for more. I highly recommend Shadows of the Dark Realm and I am excited to read more from this author in the future! Happy Reading 🙂
The Art of Reading 