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In the faraway Kingdom of the Golden Peaks, Princess Ariella lives an unhappy life as a prisoner of her family's own design. Eager to learn to fight with a sword and defend her kingdom like her brothers Edward and Charles, her father insists that she stay locked away and demands she start attending lessons with a tutor for as long as ten hours a day. Distraught, Ariella is soon surprised to learn the nature of this tutelage. A handsome young man named Austin Alvar begins to work with Ariella, revealing that she is capable of magic so powerful it is nearly unrivalled in all the lands. With a new spark of hopefulness in her life, Ariella dives head first into her magical studies, only to have her world crash around her with a war on the horizon and the magical assassination of her mother, the Queen.
While it embraces some of the familiar standards of the fantasy genre with a restless princess eager to live beyond the royal expectations, this initial installment in what promises to be an expansive series strikes out on its own path. Ariella can be a bit tempestuous at first, prone to fast anger as well as fear in the face of her father, but as her powers grow, so does her confidence. Young female readers can admire and see themselves in the Princess, learning that their actual place in the world is separate from what others expect them to become. Packed with adventure, fantasy, treachery, and romance, this book is entertaining in its own right while also laying the groundwork for a series that promises to entertain for many books to come.
RECOMMENDED by the US Review