“She’s the same age as my brother would have been, I can feel myself being swallowed up in grief.”ĭoes this happen every time you meet someone that’s 19? Because I don’t see how she copes with the world. “He’s a boy, just like my brother, I clam up and remember that fateful day.” But holy crap, it happened like 15 years ago and this girl is so sensitive about it that literally anything sets her off. She talks about a traumatic experience, and I get it, trauma is a lasting thing. The first is a bit of overly dramatic whining from the main character towards the beginning of the book.

Without spoiling anything, there are a few spots in Havenfall that knocked off a few points in my book. Where is the Wow?īefore we get there, I have one last thing to get off my chest. No human outside of her immediate bloodline knows.Ĭause this is the sort of thing that fills the first 5-6 chapters of Havenfall. Maddie’s father doesn’t know about Havenfall’s magic. Maddie wants to be Innkeeper someday, but her father wants her to go to college and hold a respectable job. The innkeeper’s name is Marcus, and he’s Maddie’s uncle. He is human, thereby being unbiased to any of the three Adjacent Realms. But that title is not merely his job description, but an honorific signifying that he is the ruler/keeper of the peace. These three worlds have gates in the tunnels beneath Havenfall that allow the peoples from these Realms to cross over into Haven, a place of peace between all lands. The other three are Fiordenkill, Byrn, and Solaria. There used to be dozens of Adjacent Realms, but now only four exist, including Earth. The heart of the world, the crossroads between the Adjacent Realms. You might be tempted to think that if she lives in Colorado that this must be an Urban fantasy novel, and you’d only be about 10% right.īecause aside from the frequent use of Maddie’s cell phone and references to pizza parlors, a horcrux, and slew of other pop culture references, the whole of this story takes place in Havenfall.

She just calls it Sterling after the first mention of where Sterling is. Maybe that’s the wrong word, perhaps just uninteresting is a better turn of phrase.Ĭhapter 1 begins with our heroine, Maddie, bemoaning her sad life. It could of course just be the ARC that I got, but I waded through a few pages of terms and explanations before even getting to the prologue.Īnd the prologue was kind of confusing. But I prefer to start with action, with some sort of struggle to get me hooked. Okay, well, you don’t really need to do that.

Anyone who has been reading my reviews for any length of time knows I hate slow starts.Ĭhop off someone’s head in the first chapter and color me intrigued.

Havenfall book 2