I was given this book for free in exchange for an honest review. Spoilers ahead.
Holt is a Mustel, a marten-like creature, in a world where people like him are oppressed by a big cat-like race known as the Panthera. After his lover vanishes, Holt gets swept up into doing courier tasks for the Clergics of the First. Together with a canine Wulpen named Freja he goes more and more down a part of darkness, until he finds himself swept up in a plot to kill the Panthera king.
Overall I had a good enough time reading this book. It's not my favorite xenofiction I've recently read, but it's solid and there is enough good stuff here for people to enjoy.
One highlight for me was the characters. Holt makes for a pretty compelling main character, as we see him go more and more down the moral drain until it is far too late for him to get out. I also liked Versha and the highlights of the book for me really were Freja, Holt's canine companion, and the rat-like Jonas. These characters truly made the book enjoyable for me and their interactions with Holt and the other characters around them were fun to read.
The world-building is also solid. While I myself wasn't too intrigued by the politics of this world, I do acknowledge a lot of thought clearly went into it and, even if I wasn't too invested in it personally, it all was handled rather well. It just personally didn't appeal to me that much and I also found the world to be a tad black-and-white at times, rather than gray. Like, we come across almost no truly good Panthera in this book, it's pretty much (with maybe one or two exceptions) just "the good smaller races" and "the bad oppressive Panthera" which feels a bit too simplistic to me.
Even the more "bad" characters on the side of good still in the end have noble motivations as they want to rid the world of the oppressive system the Panthera put in place. But the Panthera are pretty much just bad, we don't really get to really explore much of their side and how there might be good felines among them who also want to put a stop to King Bernard's rule. I think it's just a tad simplistic, even if the world-building overall is still pretty good.
Another issue I have is that Holt seemingly gets over losing his partner pretty darn soon. There's not much impact or "oomph" to Arlyn vanishing, and pretty soon Holt is out and about doing courier tasks without the story really taking a moment to process "hey, he just lost the love of his life". This results in the story, at least this first part right after Arlyn's vanishing, to be pretty rushed. Just having a chapter with Holt coming to terms with his partner truly being gone and what it all means for him before the rest of the story kicked in would've been nice.
I also really have to bring up the fact that this book needed a few more edits before being published, because it's rampant with stuff like typos, punctuation mistakes, and at least one grammar mistake. I've definitely seen worse in an indie, but I've also read indies with pretty much no mistakes in them, so seeing so many in here was quite distracting from the story.
I also kinda wished that we got to see the king more before the climax of the story. Basically he's kept as this faceless villainous entity throughout most of the story, which makes it feel less impactful when we finally get to the assassination attempt because we don't really know Bernard as a character well. We know his evil actions, sure, and we catch some glimpses of him, but it's so short and brief that I don't think he works that well as an antagonist.
I think that if we maybe had like a prologue or a chapter or two from his POV (or a character close to him) to get to know him more as an antagonist, his role in the climax where they attempt to assassinate him could've been more effective. He's not a bad villain by any means, but I think he could've been utilized better to really add that extra "oomph" when we know his life is on the line as Holt and Freja try to poison him. Because right now it feels like they're trying to assassinate a largely faceless entity we barely know.
So overall this was a solid xenofiction. Maybe not my personal favorite, but it had a lot of stuff going for it. It does have some slight issues regarding typos, grammar, and a bit of pacing and how it uses Bernard and the Panthera, but I did still enjoy reading this book overall and I do recommend it.
Rating: 3.5/5
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