DarkSkull Hall

[Series review, minimal spoilers]

I have spent this entire month reading and evangelizing Lisa Cassidy, so I will continue to do so here. And after reading this series - I'd say you'd be hard-pressed to find a better independent author of epic fantasy.

I had read A Tale of Stars and Shadow (incredible) and Inkweaver Archive (promising, but flawed) before this. With the inconsistent experience of Inkweaver, combined with the YA label, this series didn't really excite me at first. It took me five days to really get going on the first book, and then it got good, in typical Lisa Cassidy fashion.

I read the last two in a single day.

This is Cassidy's first series. She began writing it at age twenty, and the inexperience does show in the first book. We have a magic school, and four countries, and some characters that we're supposed to care about, some characters who slowly warm up to the main character, and some parental mysteries and two magic systems and various soldier guards and warrior types and the like. It's all tropes taken to the extreme, which in my opinion is at least better than unsuccessfully trying to subvert them, and if you have read A Tale of Stars and Shadow, you will recognize many of the general ideas, in slightly less polished form.

The second and third books just keep on improving, and really form a trilogy of sorts. Throughout the middle books, the plot quickens and moves all over the place, and we meet more and more characters, many of whom develop extremely strong and impressionable personalities. The characters in this series are exceptional: on a level or even above A Tale of Stars and Shadow, partially because this series takes place over a much longer period of time.

The fourth book is one of the best conclusions to a series I've ever read. If you are an epic fantasy fan, it is worth reading the series for this book. Cassidy's handling of what could have been a disastrous pacing problem is masterful. And if there were any character arcs that seemed a little blunted after the first three books, they come into full bloom here.

Of course, like any Lisa Cassidy series, this has a big romance, and it's not anything you wouldn't expect. It's lovely and unobtrusive, and everyone involved is a gem of a person, which is not to everyone's taste, but to each their own.

In terms of roughness, this is clearly her first series, and doesn't have the crazy worldbuilding of her later books. But it still has that slippery genre feel (it's definitely more “YA” than ATOSAS, but also far, far more epic) and it just has that signature that you don't feel from many epic fantasy authors. Highly recommended to read, but probably after A Tale of Stars and Shadow.

Rating: 8/10