A riveting read! This fantasy offers a heroin who is very much a normal young woman. She’s the younger of two princesses, and despite her royal blood, feels that she can’t do much of anything right. So mired is she in despair over what she’ll never be, she punishes her body by eating to excess. Her marriage to a king is a political move, but when he asks her to keep their marriage secret for a bit, her sense of self-worth isn’t bolstered. It doesn’t take long to discover that her husband has a mistress, and that he in part wants to keep the marriage secret from her.
Then she is kidnapped. After being dragged across a forbidding desert, she discovers that the people who have kidnapped her are more desolate than she has ever been. Her initiation into palace politics allows her to understand the larger movements threatening this tenacious band of survivors, and she throws in her efforts with their cause.
What follows is a beautiful blossoming. She discovers untapped layers of talent she never knew existed. She has relied for so long on the godstone, the jewel placed in her navel that sets her apart, for her internal sense of value. Now she discovers that the stone is not the full measure of her worth. A story of redemption in the only eyes that matter: her own.
5 stars!
To read another story about self-worth and self-exploration, try He Drinks Poison, a novel shortlisted for several national awards.