Saturday, August 19

Book Review | The Waking Land by Callie Bates


“This is why magic is dangerous. 
It lures you in. 
It makes you curious.” 
― Callie Bates, The Waking Land
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The Waking Land
by Callie Bates



Lady Elanna Valtai is fiercely devoted to the King who raised her like a daughter. But when he dies under mysterious circumstances, Elanna is accused of his murder and must flee for her life. 



Returning to the homeland of magical legends she has forsaken, Elanna is forced to reckon with her despised, estranged father, branded a traitor long ago. Feeling a strange, deep connection to the natural world, she also must face the truth about the forces she has always denied or disdained as superstition powers that suddenly stir within her. 

But an all-too-human threat is drawing near, determined to exact vengeance. Now Elanna has no choice but to lead a rebellion against the kingdom to which she once gave her allegiance. Trapped between divided loyalties, she must summon the courage to confront a destiny that could tear her apart.


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This book was featured in PageHabit's Book Discussion of the month under the genre Fantasy and it was tagged in Goodreads as YS Fantasy. I have encountered a lot of books with plots like this and sometimes part way through I get bored. 

It kinda started out like that - a little girl is taken by a King in a political move against her parents and she grows up idolizing the King who eventually raised her, she grows up becoming a science geek who doesn't believe in superstition. That actually doesn't makes sense because she remembers when a gun was pointed at her head and she was kidnapped.

This is where some stories diverge, it's either the King had a daughter who became the girls best friend or they grow up completely hating each other - it was the latter. And then it starts to become interesting - the girl has a way with nature and has an ability that she keeps buried so that no one will know. The author then brings in the element of "Standing Stones", now the story has a feel of wildness of the time period of the Celts.
Lady Elanna or El to her family and friends was really annoying at first. She shouldn't have ended up acting so entitles because of her circumstances but at the beginning she was. El had a really bad case of Stockholm Syndrome - she sees the King who kidnap her as more her father than her actual biological father. In her head, her family didn't even bother rescuing her. El was living inside her head so much that there were too many internal monologues.
The story got better almost near the end when Lady Elanna finally understood her purpose in being the Caveadear or The Steward of the Land. The scenes where she wakes up her ancestors and gets the trees to help felt like that scene in The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia when the trees woke up to fight.
The romance wasn't as cheesy as I expected it to be. Although El was all over Jahan, it felt primal like how mating is expected in nature. 

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐

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