Elizabeth Vaughan - Warsworn

Warning! Spoilers ahead

To start off, I'd like to set the record straight and say that I really liked this book. It's not very often that I find a book that actually takes the time to world-build and a story which doesn't take place in our world as we know it. It brought to mind the Tairen Soul Series (although, even though this book is good it doesn't match up to the awesomeness of the Tairen Soul series, now that is truly a brilliant masterpiece in terms of plot, setting, characters, you name it.) 

This book continues where Warprize left off, with Keir reclaiming Lara as the Warprize. All seems fine and dandy until an enemy worse than any they've ever faced strikes, and it is not one they can fight with swords or see with their eyes. 

I really loved how the love between Keir and Lara got to blossom a lot more deeply than it did in the first book. Although I would have liked steamier sex scenes, the romance did leave me more satisfied than the first book and only grew better in the final book (I will write a review for that one too). So just a heads up that if you are looking for a steamy read, this is not it. As many others have said, it is not your typical fantasy romance.

Now, I'm going to talk about the things that bothered me about this book, and this is where the spoilers come in. 

We all know that Lara is a healer, and a pretty good one at that. She has a lot of experience and has been taught by one of the best Master Healers around. So you can hopefully understand my disappointment when she fails to find a cure for the much-more-aggressive strain of the plague that suddenly strikes. I understand that in the real world, a cure could take months if not years to find and the collaboration of many brilliant minds. But this is not the real world, it is a book, and I would have liked for Lara to find the cure since she is a healer. It was just strange and didn't make much sense to me that the author would spend so much time on scenes of Lara healing and helping her patients and being a miracle worker (according to the Firelanders) but then deny her the glory of finding a cure. I also found the resolution to the plague abrupt. Lara spent no more time trying to find a cure after the plague had run its course in the camp. It just doesn't make sense to me that the author would spend the better part of the book on the plague and how it was wreaking havoc on the camp but then drop the matter entirely without Lara finding a cure. It was disappointing, to be sure.   

Next is the matter of her being pregnant. According to Lara herself and from what she has seen, the Firelanders love children. When the Xyian baby is the only one to survive the plague from the Xyian village from which she was taken, the Firelanders are all joyous and beyond happy to have a baby in their camp, since she is a source of hope and because children are just straight up loved by Firelanders and are a huge deal. So then why does Lara make such a small deal about her possible pregnancy? Never mind that as a woman AND healer she should know better than to ride a horse and drink coffee and whatnot, she should definitely have told Keir about it since there are people out to get her, and if an attack succeeded because of lax defenses, she could have lost the baby. And to top it off, she shoves the matter of her possible pregnancy under the rug and totally forgets about it until more than  halfway through the last book. *Sigh* it was another thing that was non-sequitur from the rest of the book.  

And then there's Gils. Seriously Lara, aren't you a healer? It was quite disappointing to find out that the heroine who I thought was going to be kick-ass actually spent more of her time on self-blame, self-pity, and feelings of sadness and misery. Pull your head out of the gutter, woman!  

So those are my frustrations with the book. In the end I did end up liking it, but it had potential to be a seriously epic book, but it fell short by just a few shortcoming of the plot and characters. All in all, still a decent and entertaining read.

Book Love

Lena