Wintertide

[cornerofmadness]

Wintertide by Megan Sybil Baker

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I got this probably close to publication date and it got lost for two decades in my physical TBR pile. I met the author (this is autographed) and her spiel must have been good because I bought a romance novel when that is so not my genre. Though I will say this is far more fantasy than romance (no bad thing imo) and the romance, for me, was not just the weakest part but also the squickest (sorry)

CW - implied rape, on page violence.

Khamsin is the daughter conceived by rape and falls solidly into the chosen one trope. The Sorcerer, the man responsible for the centuries long war, marked her at birth but she was whisked away and raised by the healer Bron who teaches her healing herbs and magic and puts her in with a blacksmith and his family.

When the Hill Raiders (the Sorcerer's men) slaughters everyone in the village but Khamsin and a few who hate her magic, Khamsin is rescued by Rylan the Tinker and he takes her to the big city where she tries to find the healer the magic told her to find.

In the mean time the tinker convinces her they're in love. Literally days have gone by since her husband, her sister in law and all her nieces and nephews are killed and she's like yep I'm good with all that and I'm ready for someone new. That's the entirety of the romance. Rylan rides off to do some work and we don't see him again until the last 50 pages or so.

That just didn't work for me. The rest of the fantasy did. Khamsin finds her teacher and learns her 'chosen one' path: she has to find the orb that the Sorcerer and his two other demi-god siblings are fighting over and destroy it. She learns that not everyone is what she grew up thinking they were, such as the Hill people.

The twist I saw coming by like chapter four or five. It works but it was still fairly obvious. It wasn't bad but it wasn't a tremendously memorable story either.



View all my reviews