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    Shadows
    Shadows
    Shadows
    Audiobook11 hours

    Shadows

    Written by E. C. Blake

    Narrated by Elizabeth Morton

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    In Masks, Mara Holdfast's life changed forever. As the daughter of the Autarch's Master Maskmaker, she had a clearly defined future: a quiet, ordered life in the capital, making Masks with her father and doing work important to the ruling Autarch. But when her Mask, specially made by her own father, cracked and fell to pieces during her Masking ceremony, Mara was exiled from everything she once knew. Now she has become part of an underground rebellion, rejecting the unjust rules of a Masked society. She must try to understand her unprecedented ability to use all types of magic-and to tear magic from the living bodies of those around her. But Mara has yet to discover just how horrifying her power can be..
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateAug 5, 2014
    ISBN9781490636405
    Shadows

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    Reviews for Shadows

    3.5/5

    11 ratings3 reviews

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    • 2/5
      For more reviews, Cover Snark and more, visit A Reader of Fictions.Last year, I read Masks and, much to surprise, I really enjoyed it, despite my cover-based skepticism. The world was really interesting and the characters, while young, seemed promising. Now, I’m left doubting my analysis from last year. Were my expectations so low I was easily impressed? Was I drunk? Is book two just worse? I’m not sure if it’s one of these things or maybe all three in tandem, but I was severely disappointed in Shadows.To start with the good, I still think that the world Blake created is an interesting one. The fact that magic can be drawn either from natural pools or from within people by the strongest magical people is really cool. I think that Blake does a great job with the power dynamics in his story. He even adds in another country in Shadows, one thought destroyed across the sea. The new character, Chell, throws an additional consideration into the heroine’s possibilities and Aygrima’s. The foundation of this series is pretty solid. There’s a lot of promise here.Up to a point, I was kind of enjoying Shadows. Then this one scene happened. First, though, some backdrop. The heroine, Mara Holdfast, is fifteen years old. She can wield all forms of magic. She could even be the most powerful person in Aygrima, though she lacks the training to actually be that strong. Her potential is massive. Even without training, she’s undoubtedly one of the strongest in the country. That’s a lot of pressure on a fifteen year old. Mara is, for the most part, very convincingly fifteen. She’s naive and, though she tries really hard to help out and come up with good plans, she really just doesn’t. This, on its own, I don’t mind so much. I mean, she was born with this power, but she’s not old or wise enough to know what to do with it yet.This is who we’re dealing with. The plot of Shadows is set in motion by two events: Chell’s arrival, washed up on the shore, and the fact that Mara cannot make the counterfeit masks for the Unmasked Army. To deal with the latter, Mara decides that the only solution is to visit her father and learn the secret magics needed to complete a mask. As such, an incredibly dangerous trip to the main city is planned with Chell, Keltan (love interest #1) and Edrik (love interest #2’s dad). Unsurprisingly things do not go as planned. The thing is that Mara’s dad just gives her a book on mask-making, which a) I think was completely forgotten about since the Autarch doesn’t ask how she got it and Keltan doesn’t give it back to her, as he would have done later and b) probably could have been stolen from the Maskmaker’s shop where Catilla got the rest of the maskmaking supplies.There’s your background. Mara’s young and her big plan for the rebels was to go to her dad. Yes, he’s the master maskmaker, but he’s not the ONLY maskmaker and that was a completely unsound plan. Even more unsound was her idea that she could View Spoiler » Mara is a young girl, struggling with a strong urge to use magic and even to kill.Then there are two scenes basically back to back that threw me for a loop. First, Mara, who has never been kissed, sticks her hand down Chell’s pants and basically begs him to have sex with her. Holy fucking shit. FIFTEEN. He, thank everything that’s bookish, turns her down with the news that he’s 25, not twenty like she thought, and that he is actually married. Right after that uncomfortable embarrassment of a scene, Mara gets into a fight with a magic-wielding Watcher. She takes the magic he throws at her into herself, but all of her clothing burns off in the process, leaving her naked with a bunch of adult men. Reminder: she’s FIFTEEN. Neither of these scenes had to play out that way for plot advancement purposes, and I find the needless sexualization of a fifteen-year-old uncomfortable.After that, the love triangle between Keltan, Hyram and Mara proceeds to resolve in the most idiotic way possible. Mara suddenly decides (after being rejected by Chell…hmmmm) that she likes Keltan, aka the first one to use the l word. Conveniently, though, Hyram’s got someone else now and he hates her anyway. What a romantic resolution! I have so many feels about this middle grade love triangle. #sarcasmOn top of that, the writing was really annoying. I’m unsure whether Masks had the same drawbacks, but I definitely didn’t like a couple of the stylistic choices. For one thing, dialog tags abound. Though, actually, I should say dialog tag abounds, since it’s really just “said” over and over ad infinitum. There’s also this continuous lame attempt to increase the drama of a moment by ending one paragraph with an ellipsis and then beginning the next with an ellipsis. Check it out yourself:The red-Masked Watcher thrust out his hands at them. Magic streaked across the water. . .. . . and Mara, acting on pure reflex, leaped to her feet and called that magic to herself.This does not increase my suspense; it makes me roll my eyes with judgment. Just so you know, this happened quite frequently. In some cases, there were two of these on a page. No. All the no.Though the ending introduced a new character who might actually be interesting (in a completely telegraphed twist), I just can’t handle anymore of this. I’ll not be back for book three.
    • 4/5
      More action packed and fast moving then the firstShadows does another number on poor Mara Holdfast. It seems this girl can’t catch a break. She is having trouble accomplishing the task that the leader of the UnMasked Army has set for her and determines that she doesn’t have the knowledge to do what needs to be done. So she convinces them she needs to be allowed back to the capital city to seek out her father. Things of course quickly go awry after that.New characters and new flamesMara is completely drawn to a new character named Chell, a young man who washed ashore from a downed ship off the coast of the Secret City. She rescues him and he ends up being a key secondary character for the bulk of the book. He comes from an island nation called Korellia that has kept itself isolated from the rest of the world due to a long ago plague. While he’s quite the resourceful fellow he definitely has an agenda all his own. Of course a handsome new face couldn’t help but draw the attention of a young girl. But romantic things in this book definitely don’t go in the directions that I thought they would. Where in Masks a romantic love triangle was hinted at, folks will be happy to know that is not the case with the rest of the series. Also, Chell isn’t the only new character we meet by the turn of the last page.Growing up is hard to doMara has had a lot of harsh growing up to do for her young 15 years. She’s witnessed some terrible things, done some horrible yet very necessary things that I don’t think she could at all be condemned for and yet she is still young and has so much to learn. I love how much she has grown in this book from the start to finish. She is such an excellent sympathetic character that you can’t help but root for and be curious as to what trouble she’ll get into next.More to the MagicI had plenty of questions left after the first book as to how the magic system in this series was going to work. Luckily some of those questions were answered here but not as well as I would have liked. I think that the level of knowledge and detail we’ll get about the magic will always be somewhat topical and no real deep delving. That doesn’t in anyway detract from the story but I’m soo into magic systems and I love knowing more. While we do learn more in Shadows it’s never quite enough for me.Setup for a delicious conclusionThere are huge developments that take place in Shadows, the biggest of which unfortunately doesn’t take place until the very last pages. However, there is still plenty of action throughout that kept me eating through it much quicker then I did with the first book. The tension and stakes were definitely ratcheted up much higher this time around and I can tell by the ending we are left with. Not exactly a cliffhanger but definitely one of those types of endings you tend to get after the second book in a trilogy because I think this is a trilogy. I’m anticipating a big to do in the next book and I can already tell by how much I enjoy this author’s writing style that it is going to be a great book. I highly recommend this series for fantasy fans!
    • 4/5
      I think Masks slipped under a lot of people’s radars last year, and even as someone who read the book, I really had no idea what a strong impression it made on me until the sequel Shadows showed up and I found myself wanting to dive right in. I do remember being struck by the richness of the world and magic, and realized that I was very much looking forward to continuing the story of protagonist Mara Holdfast.One thing I should mention is that while nothing about these books ostensibly scream Young Adult (at least not on the surface – it’s not really obvious from the cover, not published under a YA imprint, and not mentioned in the description), this really does read like a YA series. It’s more than just the age of the protagonist, who is fifteen years old in Shadows and for most of Masks; thematically and stylistically, the way it was written also made me want to categorize the first book as a YA, and book two only furthered my belief. This is neither good nor bad. However, I just think readers going in should be aware of it since it may affect expectations. I personally chose to view and rate this one as YA.Last we saw her in Masks, Mara had escaped from the mining camps where the tyrannical Autarch sends all those who are labeled traitors and not fit to be part of society. She ends up back at the system of secret coastal caves where a group of underground rebels calling themselves the unMasked Army have made their home. The rebels’ leader has asked Mara to use her gifts to craft special masks for them, which would hide the user’s intent from the Autarch and his Watchers, but untrained and inexperienced with her magic, Mara is frustrated when her attempts to do so fail. At the same time, a mysterious young man washes up on shore, claiming to be a scout from Korellia, a city long thought to have been lost, sunk beneath the seas. But Chell is even more than he appears, and though the unmasked Army remain wary of him, they allow him to accompany Mara on a dangerous mission back into the city in the hopes of reaching Mara’s father, the Autarch’s Master Maskmaker, in order to glean information about the secrets of his trade.Like most second books in a dystopian series, this is the point where the danger and desperation starts to really come to the forefront and can be keenly felt by the reader. The Autarch’s forces continue to close in, pushing Mara and her allies to make riskier decisions, and sometimes those decisions lead to disaster. Mara is already an unstable vessel of magic, trying to learn how to handle her one-of-a-kind powers, and just when the slightest spark can set her abilities off, something akin to a mega-ton explosion happens in her life. It was a twist that was wholly unexpected to me, one that I didn’t think the author would carry through, but in retrospect I shouldn’t really have been that surprised. In both Masks and now in Shadows, the story has taken some pretty dark turns, and the emotional trauma transforms Mara into an uncontrollable element, adding unpredictability to her powers which are already little understood.Mara also grows as a character, in ways that are more than just about her magic. The fact that she is played up to be the most powerful person in Aygrima is still a bit vexing, but it’s also clear from the events in this book that she is far from perfect. To put it simply, some of the decisions she makes are impulsive, inconsiderate, embarrassing, and in several cases, downright dumb. This, however, is not always a negative. Her bad choices indicate vulnerability in her character, showing that despite her staggering power, she’s still just a teenage girl who is prone to mistakes, not to mention she can barely control her gifts. I think it humanizes her and makes her less exasperating than she was in the first book where it almost felt like she could do no wrong.There are definitely more high points than low points in this novel, though there are still a couple weaknesses I should mention. Despite viewing Masks as YA, I did note that a wider audience can probably appreciate it too, since the nature of the fantasy setting and the characters that E.C. Blake has created sets the book apart. Shadows, however, feels distinctly more YA, if that is a comparison I can make. One example is a not-so-subtle hint of a love triangle which manifests itself into a full-blown LOVE SQUARE within the first 40 pages. It eventually resolves itself, and I won’t spoil how, since that in itself is a pretty interesting side-plot. However, it did bug me a little to see romantic drama worm its way into the picture so soon in the story, when there’s so much else that’s more important in Mara’s life. There are also some very dramatic, very exciting developments in this book, but also large chunks of it that felt drawn out, most of it boiling down to Mara being on the run.But as you can see, I really enjoyed this for the most part, especially if I’m looking at it as a YA novel. I probably still liked Masks a little more, if I had to compare the two books in the series so far, but Shadows was a worthy sequel and promises to bring even more thrills and delights in the next installment. A 3.5 to 4 star read for me.