The Drowning Empire by Andrea Stewart - A Series Review
Synopsis:
The Drowning Empire by Andrea Stewart is a completed trilogy consisting of the books: The Bone Shard Daughter, The Bone Shard Emporer and The Bone Shard War and is set in the coastal fantasy world of The Phoenix Empire during the reign of the Sukai Dynasty. Lin is the Emporer’s daughter and for years during her father’s reign she has felt like she has something to prove and with the Emporer’s reign failing and rebellion sweeping across the islands, Lin must do what she can to make her father recognise her as heir to the throne and vows to do so by mastering the forbidden arts of bone shard magic, which only her father knows how to use. However magic like that comes with a cost and the more Lin delves into learning the bone shard magic, the more she learns about her father and the secrets he keeps behind locked doors.
My thoughts:
The Bone Shard Daughter is the first book in the series which I read back in 2022 and binged in about two days. There are multiple POV’s with multiple plot lines which make the book a bit complex but I found after a few chapters in each POV it was easy to keep track of who was who and what was happening. Each POV also left me with a lot of intrigue, though out of the three there was one that didn’t completely capture my attention because there was a lot of mystery along with it and while I enjoyed trying to figure out what was happening, I think there was slightly too much mystery about it and I couldn’t really connect with that particular character. Overall this was a brilliant start to a series, it was fast-paced and action-packed, a little gritty and was full of entertaining plot twists and interesting characters. 5 Stars
The second book in the series is The Bone Shard Emperor which follows on nicely from the previous book, I felt the ending of the first one led to a smooth transition into the next where some of our POV’s start to overlap and bring the story together, though I found not a lot of my questions from the first book had been answered and I was finding myself with more and more questions which while kept me interested, did leave me a little unsatisfied. I finished this book in a matter of days but I did find that the pace was a fair bit slower than in the first book as it was building up more of the side characters that we hadn’t seen much of before which I came to appreciate. What I did love about this book is that it showed us some darker parts to the the plot which was a really unexpected a surprise but a good one. There was also a sub-plot that was introduced, that I felt was a bit forced and not needed and took away some of my enjoyment but all around this was a pretty good sequel. 4 Stars
The third and final book in the series is The Bone Shard War, this is my least favourite book of the series and while it isn’t neccessarily a bad book by any means, I just found myself having to push through some parts of it, if the book had been a bit shorter it wouldn’t have affected the story at all. It took a huge political turn which is fine as that has been dotted throughout the story and it does make sense but there was definitely too much of it and not enough action throughout the middle of the book. Though I did get all the answers to my questions so it does a really good job of wrapping up everything and not leaving the reader unsatisfied and I did love that we learned a lot more about both the magic systems which I found stood out as very unqiue and not similar to anything else I’ve read. However, I wasn’t particularly happy with the ending for one of the POV’s. 3.5 Stars
