The Chess Raven Chronicles #1

Thank you Black Inc Books for this book in exchange for an honest review.

Synopsis:

The first book in a thrilling fantasy series about a girl who learns to embrace her inner power.

Chess Raven is a hacker who has grown up with nothing and no one. Her parents died when she was three and her foster care situation turned out badly – very badly. But on her sixteenth birthday, her life is turned upside down.

Chess learns her mother was Queen of the Fae and her father was a brilliant physicist. The unique blend of her mother’s fairy blood and her father’s humanity gives Chess – and Chess alone – the ability to unlock a mysterious vessel that will unleash unimagined powers – with devastating consequences. Thrown into a new world where nothing is at it seems, Chess must work out who to trust as vying forces race to control her. Or kill her.

Reunited with her childhood friend Tom Williams, an enigmatic shape-shifting unicorn, Chess discovers love for the first time and is prepared to risk her life for it. But first she must learn to overcome a fear of her own power and stop waiting for other people to save her. She is the one she’s been waiting for.

Review:

This book took me a few chapters to get into and even than I wasn’t completely enthralled in the story.

This story is set around Chess Raven who has an interesting personality. At the start of the book you find our main character with a bit of sass, moral rights and a defensive nature which remained throughout the story but I didn’t see any growth. Chess didn’t really develop as a character and I failed to find how extremely easy she could harness and handle herself being thrown into a new world with unlimited possibilities. I’m sorry but without ruining the overall story plot, I would expect the character to not handle the situation so smoothly and effortlessly without any training or courting? Pretty much a peasant cannot be a queen over night without getting training in eloquent. A character cannot discover magic abilities and know instantly how to use them. Get where I am going with this? See my point? I needed the character Chess to develop more with the course of the story.

I preferred some of the side characters in this story than the main, which doesn’t happen often and I think it comes down to the fact this was written in first person but lacked the details of describing the world and situation, I needed more depth from the descriptions.

Actually to sum it up I liked Tom, the love interest as a character. With raw emotion and more emotion than the other characters he was definitely a winner for me. I would have loved a bit more backstory on Tom and Chess and possibly in flashback version? I also was a fan on Tom’s relationship with his sister Abby, though I think more on their past would have been intriguing.

I found Damius, our resident bad-guy, a highlight of the whole book, I loved the dark element that he brought to the story. I would love to see more of this character and see if how he develops.

The world building was pretty good, the contrast between London, and the fae world was fantastic and I loved how simply they swapped between the two.

Though I wasn’t overly impressed with this book I am highly anticipating that the sequel will be more action packed and phenomenal and I can’t wait to see where this story goes.

Rating: 3.5

ISBN: 9781760640248

Publisher: Nero