I finally manged to start this series! I have been meaning to for many years, and haven't read the Six of Crows books yet because I wanted to read these first, and now I have!
This is the story of a girl named Alina, who lives in a fantasy Russia, and who is an orphan without magical powers...until she discovers she's wrong. Her best friend and secret crush Mal is a soldier, and she saves him while they're attempting to cross the Unsea, which is what it sounds like it is. It's in her saving him that her powers manifest.
She gets sent to go develop her powers with the Darkling, who is supposedly the good guy, but you'll be shocked to discover that in fact he's the big bad! So she runs away and Mal, who's a great tracker, finds her and helps her, and then they go on a hunt to find the mythical creature whose antlers are an amplifier for her magic, only the Darkling gets there too and manages to bind her to him with the magic. But then it turns out she can resist him, and she and Mal escape at the end of the first book.
This is a pretty classic YA fantasy setup: girl thinks she's normal but is actually super special, along with the boy she's been in love with since she was a kid and the new hot but bad villain that she's drawn to but also knows how wrong it is. I enjoyed it, but I would have liked more from Mal; we know that she loves him, and he eventually falls for her too, but I didn't find the romance particularly convincing or engaging, which was a shame. But on the whole I enjoyed it!
Grade: B
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