Daughter of No Worlds by Carissa Broadbent

3.5/5 stars

SPOILERS AHEAD

I read this book the first time nearly a year ago, but never ended up finishing the series. I am incredibly easily influenced by BookTok, so after a resurgence of interest in the series all over my for you page, here we are.

Truthfully, I remembered very little about this book aside from a vague recollection of Reshaye, and that it follows the relatively standard structure of a romantasy book. Slave girl, grumpy ex-military commander, plot for revenge, fall in love, something gets in the way, repeat. And I love it, I generally eat it up every time. But maybe I've read so many of them at this point that it's finally starting to fall a bit flat and not pique my interest as much as they have in the past. Or maybe I just didn't feel fully engrossed because I'd already read it. I don't know what it is exactly, but I was eating it up through the middle, but sort of lost steam about 3/4 of the way through. Which, after reading my brief review that I wrote after my first read, is the same way I felt previously. I did absolutely love Carissa Broadbent's other series Crowns of Nyaxia, so I know it isn't her writing necessarily.

That said, I had completely forgotten how absolutely devastating Max's history was. The scene of him stuck in his own mind while he watches Reshaye use his body to murder his entire family is like listening to a horrific true crime story from a first person point of view. Especially because we started getting to know him by the time this was revealed, and he had already started to fall in love with Tisaanah and start becoming a person again. I would also lock myself up in a little cabin collecting trinkets and growing a garden to keep myself busy if that had happened to me too. The moment where he stands outside of the towers begging Tisaanah not to go meet with Zeryth because he knows what's going to happen with Reshaye, and he begs her to stay with him and tells her he would go with her to Threll right then and there, was so emotional I just wanted to squeeze him and shake some sense into Tisaanah.

Speaking of shaking Tisaanah - GIRL. Are you just not going to ask a single question about this "weapon" you're agreeing to have put in you? You write up at least one million conditions into your blood pact with Zeryth but don't want to ask anything about what you're actually agreeing to become? And Max's insistence on you not going up there didn't trigger some kind of warning bell for you to learn as much as you can? I get the self-sacrifice and her wanting to save Serel and the other slaves in Threll but come on, you're a smart girl and know the ways of men in power, but you hear "weapon" and just roll along with it, no questions asked? Silly.

Nura is an absolute bitch, intentionally putting Tisaanah in Max's path so that when they put Reshaye inside of her it would instantly want to bond is diabolical. Boo Nura.

The ending is where it really fell a bit flat for me. The scene in the Mikov estate felt so chaotic in a way that was too hard for me to follow, and the internalized battle with Tisaanah and Reshaye was so complicated and left me more confused about what happened. It seemed that she had defeated Reshaye by... eating its heart? And she claimed she felt magicless after the fight, but then she hears Reshaye and still has her magic in the end, so I'm not really sure what happened...

To be honest I'm not 100% sure whether I'm planning to finish this series. I made it through about 1/4 of the third book last year before I ended up DNFing with the intention to return to it down the line, but I never did. There's too many good books on my TBR right now for me to commit to a series that I'm not fully into. But again, I am very easily influenced and I really, really want to love this series. So many people say that this is a god tier series for them, so either I need to power through and have my life changed, or me and most of BookTok are not on the same wavelength.

To be determined, I suppose... because I do really love Max and would absolutely fall in love with that man in the real world, he's just so damn charming. Honestly so is Tisaanah when she's trying to learn Aran and makes little slip ups. Serel is a cute little gay sidekick, and we love that, but he's hardly in the book. Sammerin and Moth are cute and charming, but again, is it enough to make me want to continue? I don't know.