The Heart Blade will rise in light, or in darkness.
Teenage half-demon Del Raven wears a promise in scarred letters upon her skin. Now, pressured to make her first kill and seal her demon nature forever, she flees her pack and forges a dangerous partnership with young angel-blood Ash.
But Del isn’t the only one on the run from the demons. For seventeen years the Guild of Saint Peter has done its best to hide orphan Rose, a key player in the centuries-old Heart Blade prophecy.
The threads tangle, and soon Del, Ash and Rose find themselves in the crosshairs of an ancient war between demons and angels… and the hunt for a mythical weapon that could change the balance of power forever.
I didn’t expect to be blown away when starting Heart Blade, but I was hoping for a pretty decent read.
I was very pleasantly surprised!
This is a really engaging story that had me hooked right from the start. I read it in two evenings and could hardly put it down.
Of course, it did have some small flaws—but they were truly minor, and quite common in YA.
The issues I noticed were just two small inconsistencies in a character’s description, and then the typical teenage behavior in a dangerous situation that makes you facepalm. That said, I can actually imagine quite a few teenagers I know reacting just as irrationally, so it’s more a personal annoyance as a logically thinking adult than a real flaw in the writing.
Now that we’ve got the nitpicks out of the way—here’s what I loved:
Things I especially enjoyed:
- A bit of light romance, but no love triangle
- Diverse characters and inclusive topics, handled naturally and without turning into moral lectures
- A good mix of magical races: witches, vampires, werewolves, and more
- The girl is the demon, and the boy is (mostly) a normal human
- Kickass female characters who aren’t just cold-hearted assassins
- Really fluent prose that’s easy to devour, so you forget you’re even reading
- Little symbols at the start of each chapter to show who it’s about
- Some genuinely nice plot twists
- Relatable, normal characters instead of flawless supermodels with superpowers
- While it is a rather typical YA book, it still felt different and refreshingly new. Of all the “girly” YA books I’ve read in the last years, I actually liked this one the most. It tackles familiar themes but tweaks them just enough to avoid feeling like the same story told again.
There is some stronger language, and while there’s no actual sex, there are a few jokes and bits of innuendo. For a typical 14-year-old, it should be perfectly fine,but if someone is still quite young for their age or sensitive to those topics, you might want to wait a little longer.
If you have a teenager in the house looking for a good read, or if you, like me, enjoy a well-written YA book every now and then, I can genuinely recommend this debut novel!
