The Desert Prince eARC Review

Fifteen years have passed since the end of the war with demons, creatures of darkness who have hunted the night and plagued humanity since time out of mind.”

– GoodReads

My Review

I had not read Brett’s previous series but honestly it wasn’t necessary to, to read this one. It did however make me want to read the series, haha. Judging from other reviews, this may have a more YA feel to it than the first series but I really enjoyed it. There were so many great aspects to it and I enjoyed a lot of the characters, and that meant that I was definitely a little heartbroken because of that lol.

A note on it being more YA: this means that the characters are of course teenagers and there are a lot of instances where they act just like teenagers, I always appreciate this but if you may not like that YA feel, this may not be a good fit. (I, like the characters at times, did care about who was kissing who, I had time to ship, dang it!!)

For me I love political intrigue so that was a HUGE win for me and uh magical Bards? Yes please! There are so many different magical skill sets and the magic system was fantastic. It’s not a common thing to have magic but it’s around enough that there is so much lore and weight to it. This means I definitely want to read the Demon Cycle books because of that!

There’s also a huge world and the world-building is done in a way that it’s just so welcoming to those that are new to the world Brett has built, like me! That’s always great because if there’s too much you’re expected to know it’s a bit intimidating and this is still a separate new saga, old names and faces, but the focus is on the younger generation now.

**One thing I wasn’t too sure of is the tone of how Krasia is viewed compared to the Greenlands, it’s a very Western view of a nonwestern/Middle Eastern inspired country. The characters themselves are this view point coming from a Western land. I do wish we would have seen more from a character’s point of view that was Krasian (?) themselves but I wanted to note this for those who might want to know this before picking this up.**

Fun read, the pacing was kept up really well especially given the length of the novel. I only took so long because I was juggling a few other reads but once I sat down and gave it my full attention, it was pretty easy to ‘fly’ through it.

I love training schools/school settings in general and sequences like that so Olive’s chapters were a lot of fun.

Darin had great character depth, and I think his chapters were probably my favorite and I do wish there’d been more for him but I’m hopeful for the next book.

4/5 cups of coffee and thank you so much to Harper Voyager and NetGalley for an eARC in exchange for my honest review.