"Finnikin of the Rock and his guardian, Sir Topher, have not been home to their beloved Lumatere for ten years. Not since the dark days when the royal family was murdered and the kingdom put under a terrible curse. But then Finnikin is summoned to meet Evanjalin, a young woman with an incredible claim: the heir to the throne of Lumatere, Prince Balthazar, is alive.
Evanjalin is determined to return home and she is the only one who can lead them to the heir. As they journey together, Finnikin is affected by her arrogance . . . and her hope. He begins to believe he will see his childhood friend, Prince Balthazar, again. And that their cursed people will be able to enter Lumatere and be reunited with those trapped inside. He even believes he will find his imprisoned father.
But Evanjalin is not what she seems. And the truth will test not only Finnikin's faith in her . . . but in himself."
I've been looking for a good fantasy series for awhile; I never really got into Game of Thrones (especially with the tv show now and questionable themes turn me off even more) and when I saw that my library had Finnikin of the Rock, I decided to give it a chance. Hot damn, am I glad I did.
My first thought when I ended the book was "this is how you write fantasy". I understand that fantasy worlds are often medieval in type, and questionable things happened in the medieval world, but you can write a successful book, or book series, without having characters die on every page and destroying female characters.
Yes, the book took a bit to fully understand everything that was going on. A couple of times while I was reading, I had to stop and be like "wait what" and re-read a sentence. But, I'm a werido and sometimes enjoy taking awhile to get into a book, if the book shows promise and that the further you get into the book, you find out more about the world, and thats what this book did. The further you got, the more pieces of puzzle you received.
I'm not gonna lie, the fact that they took Evanjalin's word regardless, even though most of the characters at some point were all "she's a liar!!!!! she doesn't have the sight!!!!" was a little annoying, and very repetitive. However, I did enjoy that Marchetta didn't create weak female characters; every female character in the novel was strong, not afraid to rule, and not afraid to be bossy, it was fantastic.
The slow-burn was also quite nice, even though the romantic theme seemed to be thrown in just to be thrown in. I think the book would of been fine without the romantic notion, but I understand how it fits into the plot in its own weird way. Could the plot have been re-worked to survive without the romance? Yes, but Marchetta wrote the romance tastefully, so it worked well, in my opinion.
This book is like, 4.25. Not a four, but not a four point five, I'm just going to create a rating because I can.
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