4/5; 4 stars; A-

So, this series has been on my TBR for quite a while. It comes highly recommended by my GR friend Estara and a few others I follow.
I was not disappointed. I like a story with a strong yet flawed heroine. I like dragons, magics, and mysterious powerful races of beings. This book has all that.
I found it a bit tiresome how Kaylin acted and was treated by the various authority figures in her world but it wasn't enough to put me off the story. The main character in this book is only 20 years old though so a lot of the characters annoying shortcomings can easily be overlooked in light of the fact that she is practically a kid! There are quite a few books in this series so I look forward to seeing the character grow and mature.

I'm a sucker for stories where the protagonist has been unfairly coerced into something and has to make the best of it, but even that bias on my part doesn't save the muddle of this book.

Kaylin is a Hawk, essentially a policeman, in the City of Elantra. She was an orphan in Nightshade, one of the worst areas of the huge city, but escaped her life there in a blur of violence and murder that saw her the only survivor out of dozens of dead children, all marked with the same strange writing that she still bears. Now, years later, she has to go back to Nightshade with two companions and investigate because the killings have started again.

There's a lot going on here. Elantra is a city peopled by various different fantasy races as well as humans, including mortals and immortals. These include a mind-reading race, a leonine one, a winged one, and an elf-analogue and more besides. There's also various different types of magic and some technology based around magic as well. And there's also a lot of deep history, as you'd expect when at least two of the major players here are essentially immortal, and there's hints of even older races, now gone.

Kaylin herself has a lot going on as well, with her past in Nightshade, magic that she harnesses for healing and destruction and her role as a Hawk in an organization that she has essentially grown up in. And then there's the enigmatic ruler of Nightshade and her companions in the investigation, one of whom she has a pretty extreme past with.

In structure the book tries for a Fantasy version of a modern cop precinct, complete with interrogation rooms, forensic examinations and the magic version of computers. There's even a fair bit of effort put into the characters of her workmates and superiors within the Hawks. It's actually a very good idea for a book, but where the book falls down is that Kaylin doesn't treat any of it very seriously and, mostly, neither does the book. The discipline of the Hawks is maddeningly uneven, the responses of the Hawk characters to Kaylin's actions almost impossible to predict and overall it's almost impossible to work out why any of the people in authority take the actions that they do other than the plot needs them to do it that way.

And on top of all that, the actions of the bad guys make no sense either. It's all great action and very atmospheric, but it takes a special type of dense to come up with their "plan". Hint: I just thought of two better ways for them to accomplish their goal while typing the last sentence. Oops, make that three.

There's a core of cool in this book. Great setting, clever idea for a book, but terrible execution. I would give it 2.5 stars rounding up to 3 because I'm hoping subsequent books get tighter.

3.5 stars.

Oct 2024 - re-listened.
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Nov 2023 - re-listened.
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Re-listened July 2021 - Lockdown #5. Listening this time around, I have to say the author crafted a very complex world for a first book.
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Re-listened Jan 2020. On the whole, I think the books do get a bit too "wordy". :) But the overall world-building is still quite interesting. I have to admit that I've forgotten a lot of the story.
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3.5 stars. A bit too long, needed some editing.

I can't quite figure out why I didn't like this book. Maybe it's just me, but the writing is very vague. I never get a feel of what kind of city the story is taking place or of what the characters look like.

I get that the author is trying really hard for us to believe that everyone loves the main character Kaylin, but she just sounds like she's too incompetent to be a Hawk. She apparently failed all the classes she had to take to become a Hawk. Which makes me wonder what kind of organization the Hawks are if they're going to allow her to be one of them?

Maybe Michelle Sagara is trying to show us that Kaylin is an underachiever but because there was something special about her everyone wanted to keep her. I don't know, there was just too much going on here with a lot of back story that was only somewhat hinted at. And NO ONE wanted to tell Kaylin anything. She asked "why?" a lot and the answers were just so...vague that I don't think I learned anything about anyone.

And my review is so all over the place that I don't know if I'm making any sense now.

Basically, the story is really compelling and so is the world that the author has created but I think that she didn't really do a great job at bringing the world to life and making us care about the main character. I think she has potential which is why I'm going to continue reading this series while I hope it gets better.

Read Again: 2013-02-10
Rating Changed from 4 to 5 Stars

Private Kaylin Neya grew up in poverty and fought to make her place with the Hawks, a branch that police the City of Elantra that helps to keep the peace. Hot tempered, uncouth Kaylin tries to stay out of trouble, to stay one step ahead of the office betting pool, aids in difficult births to safely deliver babies, works hard to keep the city safe, hides her past, and avoids higher ups & politics. Unfortunately, trouble dogs Kaylin's steps, events center attention on her whether she likes it or not, love is painful & desire is uncomfortable, her marks are an unavoidable annoyance that draws more attention and ALL Kaylin wants to do is kick some ass, eat, sleep and win the latest wager staked in the office betting pool.

Recently, I read Cast in Peril and decided to go back to the beginning of the series. Michelle Sagara has a style of writing that mixes simple writing and subtle layers that speak volumes. I knew I had forgotten pieces of the story and it was fun to go back to rediscover them.

For the longest time, my mental vision of Severn was totally wrong! Due to the crazy adventures that Kaylin and Severn are thrust into, I've had this image of Severn being a dark haired, lithely muscular man with dark eyes. Ha! He's a red head with blue eyes! Boy was that a shocker when I read that! What else do I have wrong? I just had to find out.

I remembered that Kaylin and Severn shared a painful past that caused a rift for a while. I had totally forgotten that Kaylin's first response to seeing Severn again was to attack with daggers drawn and lethal anger clouding her mind. Finding out the minute details all over again was more powerful now than the first time I read the book.

When I get caught up in a story and really root for the characters, I fly like a storm into the story and zoom to the end! Reading like that has an edge of collecting clear images of the characters and setting but it's easy to forget exactly how harsh important threads are when they happen because that moment is quickly eclipsed by the next action.

Kaylin's life isn't a case of shiny sparkles and roses. Her life is based on one moment of loss that leads to other memories that are better left untouched. Yet, she manages to find a family, a home, and a cause of Justice with the Hawks. Driven by an inner core to protect and heal, Kaylin's careless exuberance captures the heart of fellow Hawks and they are proud to call her one of their own.

More than seven years have passed since the moment Kaylin's world was torn apart. The nightmare isn't over yet. The children are dying again. The deaths are happening faster than before. Will they be able to find out what's behind the murders? Will Kaylin be able to lay the nightmare to rest?

Cast in Shadow is absolutely awesome, and is a book that I will read over and over again. Nothing more needs said.

RATING: 1.5 stars

Wow. The writing on this was atrocious. I literally did not understand half the book because it made no sense with its convoluted writing and half-explained ideas. I felt like I had to be inside the author's head to fully understand what was going on. Not to mention the plot was really thin...

The author was fond of sentences like "it was the right thing. But it wasn't". These sort of things are all over the book, it made me crazy.

Pity, the concept isn't half bad...

3.5

A case of don't judge a book by it's cover - although I did have to wrap this in brown paper the cover art is that naff! I've previously read a couple of the House War novels by Sagara published under her Michelle West pseudonym - this read more like a novel aimed at a Young Adult audience - there's a moody and troubled female protagonist and some slightly daft human/lion hybrid, human/dragon hybrid and winged races amongst the usual human characters. Not particularly believable, but the strength of the writing and world building allows Sagara to carry it off.

What excels here is Sagara's fast paced and engaging writing, it's highly readable and as a result I managed to race through it in a few days.

3.5 Stars. I enjoyed this book for the most part. The characters were well developed and I liked the mystery storyline. The world building was okay but really could have been a lot better considering the length of the book. There is no spice whatsoever, but there did seem to be several potential love interests for Kaylin at some point in the future.

There were a couple tropes in this book that I don’t really care for. Kaylin has spent 7 years hating someone she used to love because she assumed the worst of him without allowing him to explain his actions. I don’t like this misunderstanding trope because it makes the main character come off as very immature. This ties into the other trope I don’t like, which is the immature heroine with the one-of-a-kind power to save the world. I think it’s an overused trope in urban fantasy, particularly with a female lead.

I still liked the book, but I have no desire to read the rest of the series. I feel like I am fine with leaving this as a stand alone in my library.

A story where words are not only mightier than the sword, but they are also capable of blowing up a building.

At the onset of puberty, Elianne discovers words like tattoos forming on her arms and legs. Then all hell breaks loose - children are being murdered and found with these same marks in the fief of Nightshade - her home - a rough, lawless, wrong-side-of-the-river place. Seven years after she escaped from Nightshade and found a home in the grand city of Elantra, Elianne, now called Kaylin Neya, finds that history is repeating itself.

This fantasy story, the first in the Chronicles of Elantra series, takes place in a beautifully described world with strange races and many problems. Kaylin is a Hawk, one of the three branches of service in the Halls of Law, in which she is part of the police force for the city. She is sent back into the heart of Nightshade to investigate the resurgence of these murders with former friend and current enemy, Severn. With the help of a Dragon lord and the Lord of Nightshade (a Barrani, an immortal, elf-like race, who are as arrogant and cold as they are beautiful), Kaylin must learn about the ancient language that makes up the marks on her body and the powers they give her in order to fight the evil that's searching for her.

While much of this story is made up of the fantastic, at its heart is the trauma of Kaylin's youth and how she struggles to overcome it. She is forced to face the past before she can move on to the present concerns. This story envelops the reader in its fantasy world, but what I found most compelling is Sagara's depiction of words and names and the power they can hold. In this place that power is tangible; it can both save a life and bring down walls (both figuratively and literally). Recommended.

I tried to get through the whole thing, but I finally gave up because what is the point of plowing aimlessly through a book when you would rather not? If a book is not holding my interest, there is no point trying to make it. That said, it was not awful or anything. The characters simply did not intrigue me and make me want to find out what happened to them and the plot was neither exciting or unique enough to make me continue on to see its conclusion.

I think this might be like raisin cookies - beloved by some, disliked by me.

I was hoping for a fantasy police procedural, but instead I got (what I thought was) a disjointed narrative and manufactured suspense. I also didn't love the pacing. If you read other reviews, and think this is the book for you, definitely pick it up, but it was not my deal.