by Adrienne Young
First sentence: “‘Give me the child.'”
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Release date: September 3, 2019
Review copy provided by the publisher.
Content: There is a lot of violence, some of it gory. It will be in the YA section of the bookstore.

Tova, a member of the Kyrr tribe and covered in tattoos that brand her as a Truthtongue, has spent the last 13 years in exile with the Svell tribe. Their Tala (religious leader? I wasn’t entirely sure the role of the Tala) took her in, even though most of the people of the tribe are terrified of her and what she does. And for a people that believe strongly in Fate, Tova is terrifying: she throws the runes and reads them and They Come True.

The Svell tribe is at a crossroads: they are planning to attack of the tribe to to the north, the Nadhir, but the reasoning is kind of fuzzy. I think it’s because the Svell just wants to conquer the world. At any rate, they massacre a border town, kill the Nahdir leader, and then massacre another town on their way to invade the capital.

Tova, in all this, has been throwing runes that perhaps show the ultimate domination of the Svell, but she becomes uneasy allied with them. And, upon seeing Halvard, who becomes the Nadhir leader after the leader is killed, she decides to throw her fate in with them.

As you can tell, the plot of this one is a bit, well, hard to sum up and make interesting. I did like Tova as a character — she’s an exiled person (she’s supposed to be dead, but it’s never really explained why she’s not) trying to make a home with a people who never trusted her. The romance is a bit forced; I liked Halvard, but I never really got why they were attracted to each other. Thankfully, the romance is mostly only implied; the real conflict is Tova and her desire to get away from the Svell who are really committing an act of genocide. But I’m not sure that Young really delved into the conflict between Tova and the Svell leaders. Tova took the blame for the genocide — because she threw the runes — rather than the leaders, where it belonged. I guess I just wanted more out of this; it just felt hollow.

And the ending is… weird. I won’t go into it, but I felt like it came out of nowhere.

So, I wanted to really like this book. There are parts that are great. But, in the end, it wasn’t all that I was hoping it would be.