Breathtaking story

This is the third book of the series and you do need to read them in order as each picks up where the other left off. High fantasy isn’t one of my favorite genres though I love a good well-written one from time to time especially if the subject is myths. This an absolutely amazing take on merfolk.
In this book we find everyone reeling from the battle that left them aboard the Chimera with Odhran and the Sea Witch sunken and destroyed. (I won’t tell you how since that is a spoiler). Odhran spots something in the water. After their investigation, they find a winged child in a hot cocoon and take him aboard. The island brings back memories for Odhran and Ian and they build stronger friendship and trust. The winged boy sticks to Odhran and grows at a fast rate. They meet the king and find it quite different than they thought and they also found the colony they were searching for deserted. Weary and after more battles, they head back to the mainland to figure out their next move.
Again we have a very intriguing story. There is lots of emotion and character growth as each man gains their power and learns to use it. You will need tissues! I loved how Shira practically paints a picture of the scenery with words. The sights and smells and tastes are so real. I fell in love with each character and ached with their aches.
If you like a good High-fantasy, Mermen, friendships, soulmates, a very good romance, a touch of sadness yet a happy ending this is for you!

The narration is beautiful and captivating and adds even more to a fantastic story.

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Love eternal

In world of mystery and turmoil three different peoples learn to trust and coexist. Treand and Owen, soul mates of long ago, are reborn and reunited to lead. This is a swashbuckling tale that captures the imagination.

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Such a great series!

WOW. What a conclusion! This is book three in the series and it MUST be read in order. It’s a far too complex story to jump in without the previous books as background.
In a nutshell Taren was a slave who was kidnapped by a pirate who held and sort of loved by the man who took him from a previous slave owner who wasn’t as kind. He’s rescued by Ian and the two begin their relationship – part of which is showing to Taren that he shares his body and soul with that of a merman of the people Ea. Through many trials and tribulations he also learns that his soul is bound to another’s (Treande) and that he and Ian (Owyn) shared a love in an earlier incarnation.
At the end of the last book we’d just learned about Owyn and Treande and met a whole other bevy of new characters including Sebastian and Odhrán and they have an epic battle in the end wherein Sebastian loses his lover Rider and kills himself in battle but is reborn because he’s a dragon! Now Sebastian is young again and attaching himself to Odhrán and their story continues…
The bulk of the story is Taren and Ian battling with the witch Seria and moving forward towards a new role in the government of their people. But it’s also about laying groundwork for (what I hope?!) is more story from Sebastian and Odhrán.
There’s far too much involved in this story to “summarize” and if you haven’t been following along it won’t make any sense but if you’re a fan and you haven’t read this yet – HOLD ON TO YOUR PANTS! There is SO much going on – action, adventure, battles, government building, way cool powers, destiny taking effect, past lives, future loves… it’s packed … every page is full, full, full.
**
I think for fans of fantasy this must be what heaven is like. Shira Anthony always amazes me with the width and breadth of her work. From the contemporary Blue Notes series, to the meremen of Ea to the Blood series – each so different and yet she dives so completely into the world and immerses her readers with her. She’s a gifted writer and storyteller and I think her characters are her best asset. Even the secondary characters are amazingly well thought out and three dimensional.
For fans of the series this is a sad but beautiful ending to a great series and I know many of us are hopeful there will be a spin-off with Sebastian and Odhrán!
Audio
Micahel Stellman does all the books in this series and it must take work figuring out an entire new world and giving it a voice. He does an excellent job with it and since I’ve only experienced this series through him, he defines it for me and Taren’s voice is his interoperation. I’ve really enjoyed listening to this and highly recommend it.
Overall 4.5 of 5 stars

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Not the Final Book I Needed

The quick and easy review would be that it's fairly well written. The series reads a lot more as a Slice of Life in a fantasy setting than an adventure tale. That feels right for the first book. And as you're going through it, the meandering hand-holding still plays out pretty well in book two. It's only when you get to the last three hours of the third book, where things suddenly ramp up to eleven that you notice how incredibly off the pacing feels. There is a general lacking in setting/scenery, but the characters and dialogue do a lot to carry the story as a whole. Generally, I think Shira is a pretty good writer. But I do think she made a handful of questionable choices.

Spoilers, personal annoyances, and specific critiques below.

I did see this in another review, and I will agree wholeheartedly. Taren has a severe case of lacking motivation to act, or do anything. He is too lackadaisical. Or, if we would like an apt metaphor, he allows himself to be blown about in the surf.

I personally hate prophecies. And I hate when deities exist and interfere without a bloody reason as to why they can’t do anything of substance. If the goddess can talk to her people, why doesn’t she just bloody say what she actually wants? If she can act on the land, why not just hand things to people? Why does the stone require a sacrifice? No other mortal power has been shown to have the same cost outside basic exhaustion from using energy. Why is a literal god-given gift subject to a toll? It’s a GIFT. Why do you have to PAY for a GIFT? It's not like you can't set it up to not be a gift. It could be, I don't know, a tear of the goddess, never meant to be used by mortals, so it exacts a cost because it's not for them. But they treat this stone like it's a precious thing the goddess left for them to use to enact her will. So why does it have a cost? This comes across so much like the "everyone knows magics has a cost" trope, like we're supposed to take it as a given. No. This is your own world with your own magic system. Explain it.

Why didn’t bloody Taren ask the goddess anything of value when he literally spoke to her? You had an opportunity to explain your world and you didn’t. Again. If you want to leave it mysterious, maybe don't have your character actually speak to the literal heavenly being at all. This isn’t a story of faith. This isn’t a story where the deity is a question. You don’t need belief to drive you. Taren is led by the nose with flashes of the past and visions of the future. He doesn’t make choices. He’s told what to do. He’s told who he is. He’s told his purpose. Doesn’t matter what anyone around him says. He’s a weak character led around like a child by his goddess.

If you want your lead character to be strong on his own you need faith without confirmation. Or he needs to be his own person beyond his plot driven purpose. Believing and following the will of a divine being proven to exist is hardly a feat or revelation. The character just feels weaker for it because nothing feels like it’s actually his choice. Further to that, there never feels like there are truly any risks because Taren has been given visions of the future and they are never proven to be in flux. He gets a vision, we have proof of the vision later. We don’t have a moment of “that’s not how it’s supposed to go!”. There’s no fear that the promise the goddess makes to Taren is false. So, how am I supposed to fear, at all, when Taren starts to sacrifice himself, if there’s no setup that the vision of him as a priest in the underwater colony is false? And how exactly does Taren being given a solely Ea body come as any sort of “price” when all he wants is to live under the sea with his people? It’s not exactly a cost when you are given what you desire. In which case the stone having a cost is equally as silly. We’ve had three books. All of this could have been established. It just wasn’t.

The way the goddess behaves reminds me vaguely of Milton, or, at least, makes me think that was more what the author was going for. In terms of Milton there are two stories that we covered in university that had a similar theme; that when a character committed to an act, it was at that point that they were given the knowledge of what was to come. One was Jesus. The other was a woman (I want to say queen, but she might have been a princess or noble). And it’s the same mechanic. I should know. I’m the one that answered the question about it in class and expounded on the similarities and what Milton was doing. But with Milton the characters here have the free will and conviction to make the choice. They commit wholly to the action and only through that conviction and with knowing they will carry it out does God bestow upon them the knowledge and wisdom of what will come. Jesus is a better example here. He commits to sacrificing himself for the sins of man. It is only when that decision is made, and he is making this announcement that he is graced with the knowledge that he will be resurrected and brought back to his Father’s side. He did not know when he made that decision to sacrifice himself he would be saved. He made the choice to die for the people on his own. That is powerful. And it suits well with a story that has a deity that exists but doesn’t generally interfere. Because, really, He just wants people to do their own thing. God helps he who helps himself. And what good is faith when everything is laid out as truth and fact? I don’t have faith in gravity. I believe in the science. If God wants you to have faith, the fact you can’t prove He’s real is sort of key to that.

The goddess in this book, however, is obviously real, obviously meddles, and obviously wants things done a certain way. And yet wants to be this mysterious figure that somehow needs faith? I mean, she doesn't really. It only comes up in Taren believing, Ian being wishy-washy, and Odhrán not believing. But, I have no idea what the point of Odhrán not believing in her is. She exists. Having one dude not believe in her is bloody odd. It would have felt a lot better for him to not feel bound by her, that he need not follow her whims. But to not believe in her is asinine when we as the reader know she exists and they as characters, around Taren, are met time and time again with proof. And if she’s _supposed_ to be less substantial and more of a question, well… that just wasn’t done at all.

I also completely disagree with the entire “vision” the goddess had for the Ea. Taren wants the Ea to live completely below the sea. Even with the majority of the new colony living under the water, Taren hopes that those still living on the land will eventually join them. The Ea are dual-natured. This has been a running theme since book one. To sacrifice either side completely is wrong. While I do not think that this is, at all, an intended analogy, as a pansexual person, this reads a lot like people being bi or pan and being told we’re wrong and there is only one intended way for us to live. The most obvious parallel here being “You’re not bi. Just pick one.” And while human might feel like the straight analog and Ea might feel like the gay one, telling a bi person they’re just gay is something that very much happens, and is very harmful. Taren might be stuck as one form, but the rest of his people aren’t, and I don’t think that whole “and then they all lived under the sea happily ever after” theme is actually a good one. The one thing every race had in common was a human form. Why is the moral of this story to live in segregation? It's very strange.

And then there's Bastian and Odhrán’s relationship. I loathe this. And part of that is ridiculously frustrating because I really like Odhrán, and I really like how Bastian is written, too. But this relationship? Oh my god. The only saving grace to this not being literal grooming is that Odhrán has just enough sense to punt this child to another ship when he starts being a stupid "teenager". Do I think Shira is actually trying to write secret grooming? Hell no. I think we live in a culture where (presumably) straight women cannot often comprehend of a man just being kind and caring unless it's towards a child. I think we live in a society where we're used to 50 year old celebs hooking up with fans the second they turn 18. I think there are so many absolutely garbage situations with abuses of power and influence that get treated as romantic and sweet that they bleed into our fiction and corrupt it.

Part of the problem here is that way too much of the "anything" that even happens is in the last 3 hours of the last book in the trilogy. Everything could have been resolved insanely easily if story beats were better spread out. There is nothing wrong with Odhrán being paternal to Bastian when he brings him aboard as a newly resurrected child. It has been established that Odhrán treats _everyone_ like children. The fact that he keeps bloody mentally bringing up the fact that Bastian is "not actually a child" or "could be as old as him" or "could be thousands of years old" on the other hand is creepy as hell. How about.... don't keep reminding the reader the literal mute child running around and giggling is "not really a child"? This isn't some creepy anime where the 8 year old "waifu" is really an 800 year old dragon. I mean... actually, that's kind of exactly what it comes off like, but I don't think Shira's actually trying to do that. I could just have seriously done with... zero of those thoughts.

I even like the fact that Bastian is _transferring_ feelings of care and affection shown to him as romantic. Kids are stupid, and naive, and don't understand the world. They interpret things wrong. They don't have the context. They don't have the experience. Odhrán is even completely clued in to _all_ of those things. Which is why Bastian flounces off. Now, I don't know why Odhrán didn't just flat out say "If you are too impatient to respect what I am telling you then you are too young and impatient to have this conversation, let alone progress to anything you are suggesting". Call the little shit out. He's wrong. He's naive. He's not ready for anything. You know this, Odhrán. This should not be a romance or even a slightly contemplated one. Period. And the second Odhrán has to quell physical attraction to someone who's around 13 years old in appearance and mentality? Hell no. This is a fantasy world. No one is up in here saying you need to make Ea "considered adults" at 13. Not to mention the fact Bastian isn't Ea. He's several weeks old in terms of experience in _life_ and no matter how quickly he absorbs things, he still is completely behaving like a spoiled, bratty child. And Odhrán is a thousand year old, hyper powerful, hybrid mage. It should not be considered cute or romantic at. all.

And the worst part is that Odhrán is aware of all the problems and mainly does the right thing. But I think Shira fell in love with the "end game" of these two long before she cared to actually set it up even slightly appropriately. Why make Bastian come back as a kid? Why doesn't he come back as a physical adult? Why does he have to be naive and forget everything again? Why can't he just forget only the specifics of his old love? Shira chose to make him a naive, clueless child who needed to be protected and cared for. It was not necessary to the story at all.

Or, you want to really have some cute kid moments? Fine. Do the whole Bastian death and resurrection bit way earlier, have Odhrán go back home to do Odhrán things, or have him stay in The Eastern Lands while the others go back home. And have Bastian go with Taren and Ian and do adorable family crack with raising Bastian to adulthood. Then when they pull the whole shtick in book three with Odhrán and saving the Ea, have Bastian be an adult again and have only very vague warmness towards Odhrán from his "childhood" and for them to have a very clear and obvious separation that doesn't confuse all these feelings and emotions and this literal pseudo-grooming feel. We are in a social climate where the far right is demonizing my community as pedophiles and groomers for merely existing as trans, or queer, or bloody drag queens, and then we have romance books where 1000 year old dual-natured beings are caring for and raising naive children and questioning their sexual appeal at a physical appearance of 13?

Things like this have _optics_. Choosing to write in a setting that "allows" to play in the setting of "underage" is flipping weird. Again. Do I think Shira is doing this on purpose? No. Her bio claims "she is usually in a courtroom trying to make the world safer for children". And yet her clear own naivety has resulted in a sub-plot where a child is very much being unintentionally groomed, just because Odhrán is a good and safe man. Odhrán isn't the problem here. Bastian isn't the problem here. The _situation_ is the problem. The pacing and placement is the problem. There were so many ways to make this not _incredibly creepy_. And yet, this is what we got. And yes, I'm incredibly sensitive to this element, because the far right is literally passing laws to kill people like me. Don't write queer romances with children and adults. I don't care if they are really 2000 year old dragons. I don't care that he grows up. The pre-established caregiver relationship is incredibly questionable. I dearly hope that Shira has become a hell of a lot more aware of how problematic this is since writing this book.

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