Hello there guys!!
Today I have another series review! I managed to work on reading some backlogged series that had been sitting in my Kindle since forever and that came highly recommended from fellow bloggy bookwyrm friends during my vacation, and I'm finally getting the time to review them!
For this week's Friday Reads I have The Lumatere Chronicles by Melina Marchetta. If I had to recommend them short & sweet, all I'd have to say is that if you LOVE fantasy stories, you MUST read this trilogy!
And since this series had been sitting in my Kindle for over 2 years, I think it's safe to say it counts towards my Rock My TBR Challenge list!
I'll do a lil bit of a very tiny review for each one of the books and then I'll probably gush about the whole series as spoiler free as possible!
Finnikin of the Rock
When you start a series that comes so highly recommended as this one, you do so with a lil bit of trepidation, and hoping that it will live up to the expectations. And boy did book 1 live up to the expectations! We start with a prologue about what happened in Lumatere and then we catch up with Finnikin a few very hard years later.
Soon enough finds himself travelling with a new and unwanted companion Evanjalin, a novice that is more than she admits and that promises to lead him to the missing heir of Lumatere. Along the way they pick up a stray & rather hateful boy, Froi, and through hardship and many adventures, they gather allies towards the end goal of saving Lumatere.
This is an extremely emotional distressing book. I was anguished and worried and cried and dear gods I could barely breathe during parts of this book! The world building is amazing, the character development is brilliant, and you are in for quite a few surprises!!
Froi of the Exiles
Melina Marchetta is a master story teller and she crafts the most amazing and nuanced characters. She managed to make me go from despising Froi for most of Finnikin, to accepting him grudgingly to absolutely support him 100% and feel so much for him in his namesake book that it should be illegal!
Froi had it very hard and once he sort of feels like he has found a place to belong to, with his friends and his queen he's sworn to protect, everything is rather thrown off and he has to learn to live with what he finds out about himself, his family and his country.
And we are quite thrown again for a wild ride since we leave Lumatere and we see the world from another prism, we see events from another lense, and find out that there was not just one curse and not just one country was suffering. It's hard to reconcile Lumatere's suffering with Charyn's attack and Charyn's own suffering, but Melina Marchetta manages to make us see that many things are not as black and white as we might have thought at first. Another brilliant book that destroyed me emotionally and simply made me fall even more in love with this series!
Quintana of Charyn
In the final book of the trilogy there's so much more of everything, I still wonder how I made it through!
More emotional distress over probably all of the characters, all of the ships and worry that it'll come to war over missunderstandings and miscomunications and I just couldn't turn the pages over fast enough!
I wasn't really sure about Quintana when I first met her in Froi's book and it really took me a while to warm up to her. She's such a complex and hard to like character but learning more about her, about who she wants to be, how is a survivor of unmeasurable abuse and how she must fight assumptions about her left and right. She might never be my favourite character, but she's a fantastic one and her journey affected me so very much!
It's been quite a while since I finished the book and I'm still trying to find the words for it, but it's so very hard without mentioning events or developments that can potentially spoil something, so I'll just say that this final book was as brilliant as the other two and a fantastic way to finish this trilogy!
One thing I think I have mentioned enough through the mini reviews but that really needs repeating is how emotionally invested and wrecked I was with each one of these three books. It truly is a testament to the skill of the author that I was so invested and embroiled in the character's journeys that I felt their fears and pain and doubts and suffering and victories and love as my own!
Every single character in this book had more to them that would seem at first, the main characters were all complex and nuanced and had a long way of growth ahead of them, but so did secondary characters, where we kept learning more about them and changing our perspective and opinions on them as we peeled their many layers.
And the plot? There's so much about the plot and the themes about these books that makes them not only absolutely amazing High Fantasy but also a way to make us look at real life present events through a more remote prism that can make it safer to examine our own thoughts and prejudices.
Just... I'm going to shut up about this books, push them onto anyone that hasn't read them yet and tell you that, in case you don't already know, Melina Marchetta is a master and The Lumatere Chronicles a MUST READ series for any lover of fantasy books. Also AUSSIES KNOW THEIR WRITING BUSINESS!
Today I have another series review! I managed to work on reading some backlogged series that had been sitting in my Kindle since forever and that came highly recommended from fellow bloggy bookwyrm friends during my vacation, and I'm finally getting the time to review them!
For this week's Friday Reads I have The Lumatere Chronicles by Melina Marchetta. If I had to recommend them short & sweet, all I'd have to say is that if you LOVE fantasy stories, you MUST read this trilogy!
And since this series had been sitting in my Kindle for over 2 years, I think it's safe to say it counts towards my Rock My TBR Challenge list!
I'll do a lil bit of a very tiny review for each one of the books and then I'll probably gush about the whole series as spoiler free as possible!
When you start a series that comes so highly recommended as this one, you do so with a lil bit of trepidation, and hoping that it will live up to the expectations. And boy did book 1 live up to the expectations! We start with a prologue about what happened in Lumatere and then we catch up with Finnikin a few very hard years later.
Soon enough finds himself travelling with a new and unwanted companion Evanjalin, a novice that is more than she admits and that promises to lead him to the missing heir of Lumatere. Along the way they pick up a stray & rather hateful boy, Froi, and through hardship and many adventures, they gather allies towards the end goal of saving Lumatere.
This is an extremely emotional distressing book. I was anguished and worried and cried and dear gods I could barely breathe during parts of this book! The world building is amazing, the character development is brilliant, and you are in for quite a few surprises!!
Melina Marchetta is a master story teller and she crafts the most amazing and nuanced characters. She managed to make me go from despising Froi for most of Finnikin, to accepting him grudgingly to absolutely support him 100% and feel so much for him in his namesake book that it should be illegal!
Froi had it very hard and once he sort of feels like he has found a place to belong to, with his friends and his queen he's sworn to protect, everything is rather thrown off and he has to learn to live with what he finds out about himself, his family and his country.
And we are quite thrown again for a wild ride since we leave Lumatere and we see the world from another prism, we see events from another lense, and find out that there was not just one curse and not just one country was suffering. It's hard to reconcile Lumatere's suffering with Charyn's attack and Charyn's own suffering, but Melina Marchetta manages to make us see that many things are not as black and white as we might have thought at first. Another brilliant book that destroyed me emotionally and simply made me fall even more in love with this series!
In the final book of the trilogy there's so much more of everything, I still wonder how I made it through!
More emotional distress over probably all of the characters, all of the ships and worry that it'll come to war over missunderstandings and miscomunications and I just couldn't turn the pages over fast enough!
I wasn't really sure about Quintana when I first met her in Froi's book and it really took me a while to warm up to her. She's such a complex and hard to like character but learning more about her, about who she wants to be, how is a survivor of unmeasurable abuse and how she must fight assumptions about her left and right. She might never be my favourite character, but she's a fantastic one and her journey affected me so very much!
It's been quite a while since I finished the book and I'm still trying to find the words for it, but it's so very hard without mentioning events or developments that can potentially spoil something, so I'll just say that this final book was as brilliant as the other two and a fantastic way to finish this trilogy!
One thing I think I have mentioned enough through the mini reviews but that really needs repeating is how emotionally invested and wrecked I was with each one of these three books. It truly is a testament to the skill of the author that I was so invested and embroiled in the character's journeys that I felt their fears and pain and doubts and suffering and victories and love as my own!
Every single character in this book had more to them that would seem at first, the main characters were all complex and nuanced and had a long way of growth ahead of them, but so did secondary characters, where we kept learning more about them and changing our perspective and opinions on them as we peeled their many layers.
And the plot? There's so much about the plot and the themes about these books that makes them not only absolutely amazing High Fantasy but also a way to make us look at real life present events through a more remote prism that can make it safer to examine our own thoughts and prejudices.
Just... I'm going to shut up about this books, push them onto anyone that hasn't read them yet and tell you that, in case you don't already know, Melina Marchetta is a master and The Lumatere Chronicles a MUST READ series for any lover of fantasy books. Also AUSSIES KNOW THEIR WRITING BUSINESS!
I love that you're going back to the series you love these days. They are all my favorites, too! I love all three of these books, I adore them, but Froi will always remain my favorite. That darn book just breaks my heart every single time. My poor Froi and my poor Quintana, I was rooting for them so hard.
ReplyDeleteAgreed!! Froi and Quintana just made my heart bleed and I just wanted to hug them both SO MUCH!!
DeleteI'm so glad that you loved and highly recommend this series! I bought Finnikin of the Rock a whole year ago and still haven't read it yet. Looking forward to picking it up soon now that I've read your glowing review.
ReplyDeleteJenna @ Happy Indulgence
Oh Jenna, you really need to read Finnikin ASAP! I'm sure you're going to love it AND the rest of the trilogy!
DeleteI want to read these sooooooo much! Maybe if I do my 12-4-12 "unchallenge" next year, where I only allow myself one ARC a month, I will have time for these. :D
ReplyDeleteYAAAY :D I'm so glad you loved these books sweet girl. <3 Feels like forever since I read them, lol. I must re-read soon :D I also love them so much. Sigh. But they are pretty painful, yeah? Ack. Thank you for sharing :)
ReplyDelete