Review: Creative!
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 02 8, 2014
This was a fast-paced novel with a surprising ending. I enjoyed the characters and the intrigue. At first I didn't particularly like Mofitan. I thought he was going to be one of the "bad guys", but in the end he turned out to be a pretty decent fellow. I loved the clean romance aspect of this book.I thought the idea of a stone being able to pick out the perfect mate for someone was an interesting idea. It sure would save us the trouble of picking them out for ourselves and then ending up with so many divorces. All of the couples (except for Vashia and Haftan) were perfectly matched and happily wedded until their dying day.The angst and anxiety that the women felt as they left Eclipsis made me think about the women that left Europe to become wives of Canadians and Americans in the 19th and 20th centuries. The difference being that the women in the book weren't just leaving a continent, they were leaving their world. It must have been a hard decision, and they must have been desperate.But the people on Shroud were desperate too. For the Shrouded, though they all mated with women from other worlds, only had male children. In order to further their race, this very private, insulated society had to bring women to their world in order to reproduce. And most of the women that were willing to come to their world were those who wanted to escape the lives that they were presently living. Most were prostitutes and criminals. Not your best class of people to start your society with. Ironically however, Shroud had a much better economy and standard of living that Eclipsis, where Vashia came from. So perhaps the state of the society comes more from the leadership than anything else.Frances Pauli was very creative in her creation of her fantasy world. Her descriptions of the land and sky-scapes made the scenery easy to visualize. I gave this book 3 stars. It was very enjoyable.Thank you to Zharmae Publishing who provided a free copy of this book for a fair and honest review. All thoughts are my own.This review was originally published on Shelf Full of Books [...]