“The Last Stand” by Paris Hansch

I got my hands on this book by signing up for Hansch’s mailing list (you can join me here). It is a prequel to her other books about the same world. I was not totally sure what to make of the book itself, I do have my complaints about it but most of them are inherent in what this book is designed to do. Which is to actually purchase her other novels.

The book follows Celia who is the lead priestess at a dragon temple. Her powers as such include manipulating an element and being able to influence others’ emotions. When the book starts she is rather shaken as she just used her powers to kill an assassin. Which is traumatizing enough as it is, but she also made a vow to not use her powers to kill and broke that vow. She immediately has to go from that to swearing her daughter in as a dragon priestess, turns out that her daughter is very talented as well. She then gets word that the Empress is trying to destroy her community, because also earlier that week she awakened the powers in two individuals who then went on to try and assassinate the Empress. The book ends with the Empress killing everyone in the village, the only survivor is Celia’s daughter who discovers that no one remembers her village or her at all in the aftermath.

My main issue is that everything happens so fast. It goes from peace to annihilation in maybe 20 pages or so, which seems a little overblown and ridiculous. If there was a history of animosity, I could find that believable, but the whole premise is that nothing wrong was really done on the part of these people. The incident that sparked this was told through a flashback, which does not really help and mostly muddies the timeline a little bit.

There also is not time to get to know these characters. This could make sense if the prequel was to a story featuring these characters more, but I think the sequels take place hundreds of years later. There is this one character, Tobias, who is implied to have instigated the annihilation and assassinations but that is not resolved by the end. So unless he lives for several hundred years I do not know if that loose end will ever get wrapped up.

Anyways so I am not sure what to make of this book. It was an enjoyable read for sure, and it is short and free. But I don’t know if I’ll be diving into her other books just right now.