I read an eARC of Sinner’s Isle by Angela Montoya. Thank you, NetGalley and Random House Children’s.
This book has an audience. I knew this while reading it, and it was reaffirmed when I saw the score for the book.
For me though, this book’s dialogue and characters just came off as too cliché. Especially, especially the love interest, and the main characters thoughts can be, but she not too bad until she starts talking to the king.
This is a story about people who live on the sea. The main character is a woman who can use magic. She can call these shadow creatures that are always calling for her to use them to rip apart the people who wrong her. As someone who can use magic, she was ripped away from her family at a young age, trained on an island, and now she’s going to meet all the rich people, including the king, so they can bid over her, and whoever buys her will have her horrible power to control. Not literally, more in a: they’ve been brainwashed to obey and pierced with iron to dampen their powers.
The pirate prince’s father is dying. The father is telling him he must leave the ship as his uncles have more of the crew’s loyalty and will kill him as soon as his father is dead. The prince answered with macho cliches and honestly, while I kept reading, he’s a character, not a person, I do not care.
Then the main character tries to run away with her best friend, fails, and then has to go along with being sold off or her friend dies. She then meets the pirate prince, steals something precious to him, and blackmails him to help her save her friend so they can run off together.
It’s action-packed, filled with angst, emotion, and a heist. Anyone who loves a fantasy, action, romance plot with pirates is going to eat this book up. I hope that this book finds itself in more hands of people who are going to love it.
Magical Fairy Tale 