REVIEW, Graceling

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Graceling

Series: Seven Kingdom, book 1

Pub: 2008, Gollancz

Author: Kristin Cashore

Cat: fantasy

Format: paperback (lar); 340 pp w/ 40 chapters

Age Range: YA

                Synopsis

In a world where people born with an exceptional skill, known as a Grace, are both feared and exploited, Kasta carries the burden of a skill even she despises: the Grace of killing.

 As a Graced killer who has been able to kill a man with her bare hands from the age of eight, she’s forced to work as the king’s thug. Feared by the court and shunned by those her own age, the darkness of her Grace casts a heavy shadow over Katsa’s life.  Yet Katsa remains defiant, and when the King of Liend’s father is kidnapped she investigates, and stumbles across a mystery. Who would want to kidnap the old man, and why? And who was the extraordinary Graced man whose fighting abilities rivalled her own?

 

The only thing Kasta is sure of is that she no longer wants to kill. The intrigue surrounding the kidnapping offers her a way out – and little does she realise, when she takes it, that something insidious and dark lurks behind the mystery, something spreading from the shadowy figure of a one eyes king...

 

With elegant, evocative prose and a cast of unforgettable characters, debut author Kristin Cashore creates a mesmerizing world and a death-defying adventure that will captivate you and leave you wanting more.

                Thoughts  

This one is my favourite, and in most ways I don’t understand why others don’t like it, but then I think maybe they are reading the book as a fantasy which I never really saw it as one, the world is worked up as well as any other book, but it’s the people in it, the Graced that are the main points in the book. So let’s not put it somewhere it isn’t.

It’s about a time when horses was your main way of transport, and some people where born with a gift (called a Grace), these could be anything from cooking, to fighting, to counting numbers... you know, everything there is out there.

So Katsa is graced with killing and because of this (and the fact that she outed herself when she was eight) she is shunned by most and feared by all. Until she ran into Po, a man that looks her in the eye, and somehow makes her feel like everyone else.

They take a trip and fall in love—or were they before, and yeah, I’m leaving out the good bits, like the plot, why they travelled, why the hell did his grandfather get kidnapped? And they are all good, and the other half of the book, making me feel free to talk about the love.

I love this book, I like that it doesn’t dive too much into the world, that it isn’t the main point in the thing. I like the characters and the changes they go through both Kasta with opening herself up to new possibilities in herself and with Po. And with Po and his own Grace.

Really, people, it is such a good story that I could go on and on, and yet I’m tongue tied because of it.

To me this is more a romance than anything (and that might actually be what it is and I’m just dumb as shit for not realising it) and it should be read that way, you should fall in love with the characters, not the world around them, really, it’s the same as anywhere else.

This is the book, that from the first time I read it I haven’t stop. I can’t get enough of it; I can’t stop recommending it to people because it’s just something I LOVE.

Series

[tb], Fire, Bitterblue

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