#83 Eight Will Fall

Eight Will Fall by Sarah Harian

This book was the December 'Defying the Odds' Fairyloot box pick! The book came signed by the author, embossed hardcover and exclusive under the dust jacket art.

The book is set in a land where magic has been outlawed and empaths exist in the shadows too afraid to use the magic they possess for the fear of execution from the hands of Queen Melay. The empaths are forced to mine for a mineral known as luminite, this mineral is used to control all empath magic and is the Queens greatest weapon against them. Our main protagonist is Larkin, when soldiers raid her home and kidnap Larkin and her brother Garran they are thrown in the dungeon cells with other empaths. The Queens plans for these criminal empaths is to send them on a mission to The Reach which is basically a big cave in order to hunt down an evil that is threatening her kingdom. Larkin must travel into the unknown with other empaths and a scholar guide in order to seek out this evil and destroy it. The Queen is using the empaths loved ones including Garran as leverage, if the empaths fail to carry out this task she will kill them all. Along the way they seem to uncover secrets about each of their pasts which leads them to believe they have been chosen for a reason.

Ive seen this described as Six of Crows a lot and from someone who didnt really take to that book i can say that Eight Will Fall doesnt have many similarities to it outside out the ragtag criminal group that embark on a shared task together. I actually found this book to be a lot more similar to The Luminous Dead which i read last year and really enjoyed, it had the same creepy atmosphere and horror elements.

I did enjoy this book but i didnt love it as much as i was hoping to. A few things i really liked: the cover is stunning (i know its superficial and doesnt pertain to the actual story but i couldnt not mention it!) its really fitting to the story. I really enjoyed the darker themes and when the story properly kicked off in The Reach i was here for it. The magic system was interesting so empaths can take emotions and use them to conjure things or to destroy things, i think there could have been a lot more focus on the magic system as it felt a bit lacking and left me wanting for more but this book is a stand alone.

Now for the things i didnt like: downfalls- my main one was there were too many characters in the beginning and i was SO confused about who was who and how they were relevant, what doesnt help is that they all have weird names and it took me ages to figure out what gender they all were for example there is a male character called Tamsyn. Another thing that bugged me was the sheer lack of world building or lore information, its touched on a bit but not nearly enough to immerse the reader into the world.  I also found the first 100 pages to be really slow and info dumpy which wasnt ideal, when the group entered The Reach the book really picked up from there.

Overall its an enjoyable read and not the worst YA fantasy book ive read in the last 12months for sure! I was really glad in a way that it was a stand alone as it seemed like the kind of story that could have been unnecessarily dragged out into a trilogy. This book is Sarah Harians first standalone work, she has a trilogy out that i wouldnt rule out reading as i did enjoy elements of her writing and i will watch out for any of her future work.