Review::Journey of Fate by Tracey Pooler

Journey of Fate by Tracey Pooler

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Journey of Fate by Tracey Pooler

I'm fairly certain somewhere I read that this was science fiction but it's not its fantasy though I could go for some inclusion into SFF with emphasis on fantasy. Needless, I liked this one a lot after making the half way mark.

This is one of those book someone might throw down about halfway through thinking that this is too sappy and fantastic a storybook fairytale with prince charming taking the poor girl away from her horrible life and a force marriage.

Well it's not quite that but it does have the appearance of a fairytale that starts with the protagonist around afire listening to an elder telling them all a fable of a sort. The fable includes the story of the Theos and the Theos warrior with the blackheart and hatred for the Chorikos.

And Cierra's life as we see it from the start is not so bad. Her parents love her and her father even goes so far as to teach her some self-defense which might be considered a bit odd for the mores of their world. But soon a brother comes to fill that gap of a missing heir and when she has reached the age of marriageability her father naturally arranges a marriage. How is he to know its to someone who has threatened her in the past.

In the mean time she's met her prince charming Thymos, whose name she doesn't obtain for quite some time and when she finally gets it she knows it seems familiar but she can't quite put her finger on it. So when she runs away and runs into Thymos she begins the road to a fairytale marriage that is soon to begin a path of strife. Cierra is Chorikos and Thymos is Theos and Thymos' mother won't allow such a marriage.

Worse than that, Cierra soon finds out she may have married the devil himself.

It takes halfway through the book before the magic starts. Both literal and figurative. Anyone giving up on it early will miss all of that. Some things and people are not as they seem and the author has carefully tried to be sure the reader only discovers these at the same time as the main character obtains them. That may have some readers questioning how a person might not know that their good friend whom their mother didn't like was actually a stepbrother.(I'm not sure he didn't it's just that as it is given to the reader the first time it's not all that clear.) There are other revelation like this that come along and if the reader sticks with the story it all starts to make sense.

Overall it's a well told tale though some plot decisions for the storyline leave opening for people to leave the story early before seeing things unfold. Cierra starts out almost looking to be a bit whinny though I was fully empathizing with the indignation about the arraigned marriage and quite on board about avoiding that. And it did become interesting when that went from out of the frying pan and into the fire so Tracy Pooler's path taken to get there is commendable though slightly dangerous toward keeping the reader interest.

Great Fantasy for Fantasy and SFF lovers if you can stick with it.

There are a few grammar problems, less than a handful that I found. But more distressing is that the ebook has scene changes that have no warning and it was extremely jarring causing me to have looked back to figure out where I was in the story.

J.L. Dobias



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