Queen of Chaos by Kat Ross Blog Tour: Review & Giveaway!!

Hello there guys!

Today I'm super happy to take part of the blog tour for Queen of Chaos, the third and final book in the Fourth Element series by Kat Ross!

You'll be able to find all the details about the book as well as my review and a giveaway!


Queen of Chaos by Kat Ross
(The Fourth Element #3)
Publication date: January 18th 2017
Genres: Fantasy, Young Adult

Persepolae has fallen.

Karnopolis has burned.

As the dark forces of the Undead sweep across what remains of the empire, Nazafareen must obey the summons of a demon queen to save Darius’s father, Victor. Burdened with a power she doesn’t understand and can barely control, Nazafareen embarks on a perilous journey through the shadowlands to the House-Behind-the-Veil. But what awaits her there is worse than she ever imagined…

A thousand leagues away, Tijah leads a group of children on a desperate mission to rescue the prisoners at Gorgon-e Gaz, the stronghold where the oldest daēvas are kept. To get there, they must cross the Great Salt Plain, a parched ruin occupied by the armies of the night. A chance encounter adds a ghost from the past to their number. But will they arrive in time to avert a massacre?

And in the House-Behind-the-Veil, Balthazar and the Prophet Zarathustra discover that they have more in common than meets the eye. But is it enough to redeem the necromancer’s bloodstained soul and thwart his mistress’s plans?

As a final showdown looms with Queen Neblis, the truth of the daēvas’ origins is revealed and three worlds collide in this thrilling conclusion to the Fourth Element series.

 Amazon

Previous books in the series:

REVIEW

Writing a review for the last book of a series, (and one that connects with another series even!) it's always a very daunting task for me... I'm always unsure about how to review the book, what to mention, what not to mention because I'm always scared that I might end up spoiling something without meaning to!

Let's begin with the beginning, shall we? I was a little surprised when the book started with a new POV, and at first Tijah's voice was so different from Nazafareen's that it was challenging, but given how our characters are separated and have two separate aims and are in very separate places, we needed Tijah's POV for their story to be told properly. I must confess soon enough I fell in love with Tijah's voice and her pain and bravery kept breaking my heart!

And not only that but we also got Lysandros' POV in this book and I simply loved his voice from the very first moment!

As always Kat Ross manages to juggle the balance between world building, character development & plot advancement beautifully! No flat characters, no cookie cutter ones even those that seem to be more in the periphery or not as "important", there's an attention to detail always. And the world building... the world building has to be my favourite part of this series because I adore the mix of fantasy & ancient history that Kat has created! Ancient Persia, Alexander the Great and then mythology made real! And oh my goodness... those revelations and twists and... *flails* I really cannot say any more because I'm sure I'll spoil something and nope, it needs to be experienced with as little knowledge as possible! But trust me, hold onto your socks!

Nazafareen & Darius have a wonderful relationship and I love how they've grown as a couple and as a team over the books, and how the slow burn has built into this amazing blaze! Great way to build up a romance for sure and one that had this romancephobic sighing happily, and that's saying something!

Balthazar was a character that I hated but felt bad about it but hated again on book two and it continued in this one! He's such an amazing grey character that you want to hate but want to shake at the same time... Kat has done such an amazing job with him!

After the ending I've even happier that Kat's other series will mix up with this one in the way it will, because not only I loved The Daemoniac but I need more from our daeva friends!

A fantastic ending to a very original series that got better with every page and every book! Kat Ross always knows how to make this bookworm happy and to get me through all the spectrum of feels! Very much deserved 4 stars!



About the author:

Kat Ross worked as a journalist at the United Nations for ten years before happily falling back into what she likes best: making stuff up. She lives in Westchester with her kid and a few sleepy cats. Kat is also the author of the dystopian thriller Some Fine Day (Skyscape, 2014), about a world where the sea levels have risen sixty meters. She loves magic, monsters and doomsday scenarios. Preferably with mutants.

Website | Goodreads | Facebook | Twitter

GIVEAWAY

  a Rafflecopter giveaway

 

The Blood of the Prophet by Kat Ross Blog Tour: Review & Giveaway!

Hello guys!

I'm quite pleased to take be taking part on the Blog Tour for Blood of the Prophet by Kat Ross, the second book on her The Fourth Element series!

I'll be giving you some information on the book & author below, as well as sharing my review and a tour wide giveaway!


Blood of the Prophet by Kat Ross
(The Fourth Element #2)
Publication date: September 12th 2016
Genres: Fantasy, Young Adult

Visionary. Alchemist. Savior. Saint.

The Prophet Zarathustra has been called many things. Now he spends his time drawing pictures of weird-looking goats. That’s what happens when you’ve been stuck in a prison cell for two hundred years. But the man who might be mad, and is definitely supposed to be dead, has suddenly become very valuable again…

It’s only been a few weeks since Nazafareen escaped the King’s dungeons with her daēva, Darius. She hoped never to set foot in the empire again, but the search for the Prophet has led them to the ancient city of Karnopolis. They have to find him before Alexander of Macydon burns Persepolae, and Darius’s mother with it. But they’re not the only ones looking.

The necromancer Balthazar has his own plans for the Prophet, and so does the sinister spymaster of the Numerators. As Nazafareen is drawn in to a dangerous game of cat and mouse, her newfound powers take a decidedly dark turn. Only the Prophet understands the secret of her gift, but the price of that knowledge may turn out to be more than Nazafareen is willing to pay…

Goodreads | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Kobo

Sequel to:

About the author:

Kat Ross worked as a journalist at the United Nations for ten years before happily falling back into what she likes best: making stuff up. She lives in Westchester with her kid and a few sleepy cats. Kat is also the author of the dystopian thriller Some Fine Day (Skyscape, 2014), about a world where the sea levels have risen sixty meters. She loves magic, monsters and doomsday scenarios. Preferably with mutants.

Website | Goodreads | Facebook | Twitter

REVIEW

Kat Ross has become an auto-buy author after managing to make me love her books no matter what she writes, be it dystopia, fantasy or mystery, and this one was one more reason to reaffirm my love!

Blood of the Prophet is the second book in her The Fourth Element series and although it starts a bit on the slow side of things, and with some choices on Nazafareen & Darius side that made me shake my head, but it never suffered from "second book syndrome" and before the first third of the book mark the action quickly started picking up pace, and started hinting at some rather juicy revelations to come and change the way we see the world, and what our characters knew or thought they knew!

I love how the world building is expanded, not only in terms of the Empire and cities visited but also in terms of what we get to know about the daevas, the magic system and the Druj and what they are and aren't. And I'm quite excited about getting to know more in the upcoming books!

I love that Nazafareen and Darius' characters continue to grow both separatedly and as a team, and that we finally get a lil bit of progress on the romance side of things, although it never takes over the plot or the story, and that's one thing I'm really thankful for! It's not the only important relationship though, because the friendships between Myrri and Tijah and the friendship between Tijah and Nazafareen, and how well the four of them worked together.

I was quite surprised when we started getting POV chapters for two of the main antagonists of the book, the Necromancer and the Numerator, but it served the purpose to giving us an insight on their heads (not very pretty places to be inside, though) and motivations and to give us more information about the past as well as the present of the whole story, and they were both quite complex characters and both made my skin crawl for different reasons!

The ending of the book really left me wishing for book 3 like RIGHT NOW, so I hope that Kat Ross is writing like the wind! Very much deserved 4 stars for this one!

GIVEAWAY!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Blood of the Prophet by Kat Ross Cover Reveal!!!

Hello guys!!

Today I'm so super excited to take part of the cover reveal for the sequel for The Midnight Sea (that I loved, both the book and the cover!!) organized by Xpresso Book Tours and I just cannot stop looking at it because it's OH SO GORGEOUS!!





Blood of the Prophet by Kat Ross
(The Fourth Element, #2)
Publication date: September 12th 2016
Genres: Fantasy, Young Adult

Visionary. Alchemist. Savior. Saint.

The Prophet Zarathustra has been called many things. Now he spends his time drawing pictures of weird-looking goats. That’s what happens when you’ve been stuck in a prison cell for two hundred years. But the man who might be mad, and is definitely supposed to be dead, has suddenly become very valuable again…

It’s only been a few weeks since Nazafareen escaped the King’s dungeons with her daēva, Darius. She hoped never to set foot in the empire again, but the search for the Prophet has led them to the ancient city of Karnopolis. They have to find him before Alexander of Macydon burns Persepolae, and Darius’s mother with it. But they’re not the only ones looking.

The necromancer Balthazar has his own plans for the Prophet, and so does the sinister spymaster of the Numerators. As Nazafareen is drawn in to a dangerous game of cat and mouse, her newfound powers take a decidedly dark turn. Only the Prophet understands the secret of her gift, but the price of that knowledge may turn out to be more than Nazafareen is willing to pay…

Sequel to:

About the author:

Kat Ross worked as a journalist at the United Nations for ten years before happily falling back into what she likes best: making stuff up. She lives in Westchester with her kid and a few sleepy cats.

Kat is also the author of the dystopian thriller Some Fine Day (Skyscape, 2014), about a world where the sea levels have risen sixty meters. She loves magic, monsters and doomsday scenarios. Preferably with mutants.

Website | Goodreads | Facebook | Twitter

GIVEAWAY!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

The Midnight Sea by Kat Ross Blog Tour: Review & Giveaway!!

Hey there guys!

Today I'm once again extremely pleased to be part of the Blog Tour for another Kat Ross book, this time is for The Midnight Sea, a fantasy with some historical touches, hosted & organized by the lovely Giselle from Xpresso Book Tours!

Today I will be sharing my review with you all, as well as sharing a giveaway at the end of the post, so stay tuned for that! But first, let me give you a lil bit of info about the book and the author!

The Midnight Sea by Kat Ross

(Fourth Element #1)
Publication date: May 10th 2016
Genres: Fantasy, Young Adult

They are the light against the darkness.
The steel against the necromancy of the Druj.
And they use demons to hunt demons….

Nazafareen lives for revenge. A girl of the isolated Four-Legs Clan, all she knows about the King’s elite Water Dogs is that they bind wicked creatures called daevas to protect the empire from the Undead. But when scouts arrive to recruit young people with the gift, she leaps at the chance to join their ranks. To hunt the monsters that killed her sister.

Scarred by grief, she’s willing to pay any price, even if it requires linking with a daeva named Darius. Human in body, he’s possessed of a terrifying power, one that Nazafareen controls. But the golden cuffs that join them have an unwanted side effect. Each experiences the other’s emotions, and human and daeva start to grow dangerously close.

As they pursue a deadly foe across the arid waste of the Great Salt Plain to the glittering capital of Persepolae, unearthing the secrets of Darius’s past along the way, Nazafareen is forced to question his slavery—and her own loyalty to the empire. But with an ancient evil stirring in the north, and a young conqueror sweeping in from the west, the fate of an entire civilization may be at stake…

 Amazon

About the author:

Kat Ross worked as a journalist at the United Nations for ten years before happily falling back into what she likes best: making stuff up. She lives in Westchester with her kid and a few sleepy cats. Kat is also the author of the dystopian thriller Some Fine Day (Skyscape, 2014), about a world where the sea levels have risen sixty meters. She loves magic, monsters and doomsday scenarios. Preferably with mutants.

 Website | Twitter | Facebook | Goodreads

REVIEW

I was pretty sure I would enjoy The Midnight Sea because I had really enjoyed Kat's take on the dystopia genre when I was already feeling a lil burnt out of it. So seeing that she was tackling fantasy, being one of my fave genres, and that was mixing it with historical fiction? I was really excited to get my hands on it!

The Midnight Sea is set during the height of the Persian Empire but it's not exactly alternative history, it's more on the side of taking a few bits here and there for setting but mostly taking its own road to show us how lies can be built up on for control and how in that need for control an entire race of people or supernaturals can be demonized and made less to justify that control.

Nazafareen lives with her tribe in the mountains until everything changes when her sister dies and she decides to leave with those recruiting for the King's army against the Druj, the demons that took away her sister.

I had a few issues at the beginning of the book, because when Nazafareen joins the Water Dogs army, time passes in leaps and bounds and the progression felt a lil choppy, at least for the first quarter of the book. I understand that nothing much probably passed on that time other than some training, but seemed like some of the relationships weren't as well built up from the beginning as others. That is the reason I'm not giving this one 5 stars, because although it never bothered me enough to want to give up on the book, it did feel a lil choppy.

But, once Tijah was introduced as an ally and not as a rival, and once Darius entered the story, putting Nazafareen's training into perspective and bringing some real conflict when she has to confront her own daeva and see if what she thought applies to him now being a real being and not just a hypotetical entity. Wondering if the inherent evil of a "race" is real or not always starts with an individual, and that's very well depicted here.

We get more than a few surprises, characters that we thought were good guys end up being anything but an ally, those that we thought were bad guys or evil might not really be that, and truths accepted for many years end up crumbling to dust and leaving Nazafareen unsure of who to trust or what path to follow, until she decides to face the truths, both within and without!

I loved the little historical nuggets here and there, even with names changed, some geography was easy enough to figure out and I'm so very excited to see where the series will take us next! We're left with quite a few revelations to digest, two quests that will start in the next book and meeting an intriguing and very dangerous enemy! Simply cannot wait!

Very well deserved 4 stars for this one! Highly recommended if you like your fantasy with both magic and a lil bit of historical references!

GIVEAWAY

a Rafflecopter giveaway

You can follow the rest of the blog tour HERE!