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I think it was Honey who first recommended this to me. I had it on my amazon wishlist for a while, but then I found the whole trilogy in a box set on a shelf in my mom's house, completely covered with dust. I really wish I had found it a long time ago. There were things in it that reminded me of Kristen Britain's Green Rider books, and of Tamora Pierce's Alanna books. This was definitely published first, though. I don't know why I never discovered it back when I was scouring my mother's house for books to read--the box set had clearly been sitting in exactly that spot for years.
In terms of the actual content of the book, it's interesting that I kept looking for more conflict than there was--waiting for Talia's friend Jadus to secretly be a traitor, say, or for her use of her empathic gifts on other people to be somehow inappropriate. Nope. She was doing all the right things, and all the people who she thought were her friends really were, and the people who weren't her friends were shown to be enemies right from the start. All the conflict was in Talia herself, and with her inability to recognize how much she deserved the position she had--she kept wanting to earn her place when she already had it. The climax of the book showed her to be indispensable, for talents that only she possessed, and at the end she finally believed herself to belong. Kind of a quiet story arc, but it still made for a good book. I'll definitely go on to read the rest. Just, you know, maybe not this week.
In terms of the actual content of the book, it's interesting that I kept looking for more conflict than there was--waiting for Talia's friend Jadus to secretly be a traitor, say, or for her use of her empathic gifts on other people to be somehow inappropriate. Nope. She was doing all the right things, and all the people who she thought were her friends really were, and the people who weren't her friends were shown to be enemies right from the start. All the conflict was in Talia herself, and with her inability to recognize how much she deserved the position she had--she kept wanting to earn her place when she already had it. The climax of the book showed her to be indispensable, for talents that only she possessed, and at the end she finally believed herself to belong. Kind of a quiet story arc, but it still made for a good book. I'll definitely go on to read the rest. Just, you know, maybe not this week.
