Excellent book, loved it! Looking forward to more from this author! Apologies for the lateness of my review

This is the first publication by Tab Stephens (https://tabstephens.com). Auraria was published last May. It is the 72nd book I completed reading in 2024.

Opinions expressed here are unbiased and entirely my own! Due to scenes of violence, I categorize this novel as R.

While Princess Elisa of Llanos has built support from the merchants and many commoners. Her uncle, Crown Prince Logan, sees Elisa as an obstacle to his becoming King. Elisa already believes that Logan is behind the death of her aunt. He arranges for charges of treason to be made against Elisa. The Princess chooses for the charges to be resolved through trial by combat.

Elisa’s best friend, Dame Lilly, will represent the Princess. Lilly has been Elisa’s guardian knight and is proficient with a sword. Lilly is also a priestess of the earth goddess, giving her magic skills. She faces Lord Orlando, who is known widely as ‘Mr. Invincible’. The contest between the two is vicious, but Lilly prevails, proving Elisa innocent of the charges.

Elisa has survived, but her future is in question. Logan will not stop until he is rid of her. The Princess decides she must put distance between herself and Logan. Prince Ryne of Vorland has made a marriage offer. The two had met a few years earlier, but barely know each other. Still, marriage to Ryne offers Elisa safety. Hopefully her feelings for Ryne will grow over time.

The party making the trip to Vorland is a mix of those loyal to Elisa and those sent by Logan to spy and create problems. The journey to Vorland is fraught with danger. They face attacking monsters, mercenaries disguised as bandits, and treachery from within. Logan has used his influence and wealth to see that Elisa has a difficult journey. Her death would be a welcome outcome for Logan.

Elisa’s troop is met by William at a critical moment. He has been sent by Ryne to ensure the princess is safe for the remainder of her journey. He will have to work hard to carry out his mission.

Will Elisa survive the journey to Vorland? How will she react to Ryne, who she has not seen in five years? Will there be more attacks instigated by Logan?

I enjoyed the 12.5 hours I spent reading this 286-page fantasy. The book reads like a detailed outline instead of a rich novel. I like the chosen cover art. I give this novel a rating of 3.2 (rounded to 3) out of 5.

You can access more of my book reviews on my Blog ( https://johnpurvis.wordpress.com/blog/).

My book reviews are also published on Goodreads (https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/31181778-john-purvis).

This book had all the charm, characters, and action needed for a successful fantasy story. Unfortunately, I was not in-love with the writing and ultimately had a hard time reading due to this. A lot of information was told, not shown, and the POV was very confusing at times.

This book started off solid for me. I was engaged and rooting for Lily and Elisa. The characters and plot were well done until after a battle takes place. At this point I felt the story could have used some good editing. Saying "I demand you to stop" should have been "I demand that you stop" or "I command you to stop". Also, at one point there is an "antagonizing wait". Should this have been an "agonizing wait"? Overall, the story would have been improved by giving more attention to how the magic worked or who could use it. There seemed to be a lot of major things happening that were too easily resolved with convenient solutions that. I think the story has potential and I would read the next in the series.

Auraria has an interesting premise but the writing it quite clunky and I found this writing style took me out of the story. I struggled to connect to most of the characters but liked William and hope we will see more from this character in future.

I think the story has potential as a YA novel, but does not have the world building for an epic fantasy. This story would benefit from further editing to adjust the target demographic and to reduce the info dumping.

Overall this was a very easy read, but don’t feel it is one I would recommend for lovers of fantasy.

Auraria by Tab Stephens is an action packed, multi POV story that has all the fights, magic, and drama you could want. Unfortunately, I just did not connect with many of the characters and this fell a bit flat for me. However, I can see the appeal of the story and many of the details were cleverly written.

My overall thoughts on Auraria is that it could have been an amazing novel, if it wasn't so messy. The writing style and POV just didn't work for me it was limited to 3rd person and felt like I was reading a report rather then a book. While some might like 3rd person narrative I found out with this book that it's not my cup of tea. I ended up DNFing at 20% because I couldn't connect to any character and just didn't care about what happened.

Thank you NetGalley and Atmosphere Press for providing the eARC for my honest review.

This was very beautiful! I very much enjoyed reading this book and I would highly recommend this book. It was so addictive!

Review: Overall take on this was 'Meh'. Most of this novel is a running narration with a few interludes of dialogue between the characters. Not my thing really, as the character build becomes limited to the narrative detail and subsequently you don't really care what happens to them. POV makes a huge difference in building characterization, IMHO.

Princess <insert any name here> is all speshully smart and beautiful and could do anything at six-nine years old along with her super down to earth bi-sexual knight protector lady who joined the mercenaries at around the same age. Ho-hum. Why Princess # could perform intense investigations for the merchant guild while making tons of money. By the time she is 18, she is recognized as a magic prodigy. Knight lady has super manna reserves and kills ogres, giants and wolves, Oh My! Talk about loading characters with magic where dire circumstances are just an interlude in the quest. zzzz.

I want to say that this novel was written as a joke. It is just too OTT with standardized tropes, over done narration and rampant magic. One step further and this is a total farce, and funny too.

Rating: 1.6/5

Reading the description for this book - I figured it would be right up my alley - Magic, kingdom, quest, a little romance. However I really could not get into the writing style and story. I had to DNF at 10%. The writing was cluttered and scattered at the same time. The plot just kept yo-yoing all over the place. I also am not a fan of starting a story ten steps ahead and then having to spend chapters catching up and explaining the beginning. Sadly, this book and writing style is not my cup of tea.

This review contains spoilers.

Overall the story is very interesting, however, it takes some mental fortitude to wrangle the differing points of view. It was easy enough to follow it was just a strange read to bounce from person to person with little setup, much like sharing that mental space mentioned in the book. I did enjoy the shared mental space premise. Most of the descriptions and plot felt like I was being told a story instead of experiencing it for myself, which is why I couldn’t justify the fourth star. This also tended to make the pacing feel off and the dialogue feel forced. Take for instance when Elisa and Rhyne are summarizing the others life goals. . They go through all this explanation of things I wouldn’t have thought of and both end it with something similar to “How’d I do?” How much cooler would it have been if I got to feel like I was as smart as Elisa and Rhyne and figured the plan out a little and a little along the way? There were definitely missed opportunities for character development and reader suspense that would have helped the pacing and the “show, don’t tell” aspect.

I did like how all the protagonists had major flaws that made them seem more relatable, but because there was little character growth away from these flaws they always remained characters instead of feeling like real people. Even with all the odd stuff going on with William/Abrun (Elvish clone, alien from Earth), the characters remained flat instead of growing with their reputations.

All the informal chatter from Rhyne’s supporters, both on the comms links and in person made it difficult for me to believe he held all the power to do the “impossible” tasks. And at one point it took away from the power of the story with joking at inappropriate times. It might not have been inappropriate if the pacing were not so jumbled. Where I wanted this to be a roller coaster so bad, it was paced like someone learning to drive a manual shift…jerky during transitions. For example, at the end when Elisa is mortally wounded. I was shocked, didn’t expect it, then it cuts to a few days later, and she’s joking about it like it wasn’t a big deal. That was a traumatic event not only for Elisa, but for Lily and Rhyne. I don’t know what sort of miracle processing happened in those few days, but it was like whiplash for me reading it.

I will say that the first 2/3rds of the story seemed better than the last third, and I can’t pinpoint where it started falling apart for me other than when William left and the girls stayed with Rhyne. The last third was much harder to want to finish than the first portion.

Did I like the story? Yes. Will I read the second book? Probably, however, I’m a little saddened that I’m not on the edge of my seat waiting for it.

This book had an interesting world setting filled with action and magic. There is some small side romance plots but they are definitely not the point of this book. The book seems to mostly focus on three main characters who are bonded together through magig.

I felt like the book was interesting for sure and i did enjoy reading it. Hoever i have to admit i had some issues. I felt like the story was told in a very general point of view and it seemed to jump from 3rd person to a pov of a person in different sentences which sometimes confused me a little. As well as feeling like i couldnt connect with any of the characters, so maybe some more pepth would have been nice. Some things were a little confusing however i was very impressed with the writer coming up with the auraria network idea!

So overall this book has a lot of action so if you are looking for fights, magic and a bit of drama this one might be for you!

This reads very much like a translated Japanese light novel, the kind that often gets adapted to anime or manga: the names, the tropes, the setting, the prose all remind me of that genre. That means that if you're looking for a Western-style fantasy novel, it may seem a little off. It's also a first novel, and that shows; the craft needs some work, and even in a genre that tends towards cliché, it's not the most original thing I ever read.

Having said that, the enjoyment that light novels provide is in the likeable characters and their bombastic adventures, and there it's perfectly sound. There's even some character development.

Some of what follows could be considered minor spoilers, but most of that is either in the blurb or completely predictable.

Let's talk about the names, tropes, setting and prose for a bit. The names, as is often the case both in light novels and in fantasy generally, don't have any kind of coherent scheme to them. In the royal family of the kingdom of Lladros (which sounds Welsh), the king is Friedrich (Germanic), and his three children are Sarai (Hebrew) and Logan and Miller (a Scottish and an English surname, respectively, which sound like a couple of millennial or Gen Z brothers). I had particular trouble believing in a prince called Miller, especially because the nobility in this book are mostly very snooty towards commoners; this is one of the ways you can tell the good nobles from the bad nobles, not that it's difficult to do so in general. The place names are equally inconsistent in their origin.

Apart from a few villains, by the way, being a named character confers plot armour like a Sherman tank; a lot of innocents are killed by the bad guys in the course of the book, but they are all nameless and faceless.

Moving on to tropes, the heroes are massively OP, able to use vast amounts of magic, fight off dozens of enemies, build a thick defensive wall around a village in a week, ride dragons, and righteously burn the entire estate of a villainous noble with literally the power of the surface of the sun. One of the OP heroes is a transmigrator, a person from our world (the exact form this takes is one of the few original things; <spoiler>their soul is brought from our world and put into a clone, which would otherwise have no will of its own</spoiler>). As already mentioned, the good nobles care for the common people and have great plans for their prosperity and development. There's a threat from a Demon King stirring. There's the concept of an international, non-partisan Adventurers(') Guild. We're told that polygamy is commonly accepted among nobles, although we're not shown anyone actually practicing it (I've noticed that in most Japanese fantasy stories where this is a trope, only the main character actually practices polygamy, however common it's supposed to be).

The setting is your standard JRPG version of sword and sorcery, with goblins, wolves, ogres, giants, dragons, centaurs, elves, dwarves, halflings, earth magic, etc., though beast people, a staple of Japanese-style fantasy, are missing. Magic can do all kinds of convenient things, notably including providing instantaneous communication over a distance, which is helpful when characters are separated.

This-world references, including slang phrases and quotes from movies, often find their way into the mouths of people who are not transmigrators. The prose itself is basic, sometimes (especially early on) very inclined to tell instead of showing; at least one entire chapter goes by with no dialog and only summaries of events. We get near-meaningless cliché phrases like "Failure is not an option". The commas and apostrophes are at least in the right places, apart from the fact that there are no apostrophes in some phrases that I would punctuate as "Merchants' Guild" and the like; you could make an argument for those phrases having no apostrophe, and at least it isn't put before the S. There are some vocabulary glitches, mangled phrases, and a few dangling modifiers, and the past perfect tense isn't always used where it should be. I've seen far worse (and this is a pre-publication version I got via NetGalley, so some of them may be fixed by the time of publication; I plan to report the vocabulary ones to the publisher).

The story itself follows a princess, Elisa - usually a character type I avoid, but I let this one go because the premise sounded interesting - who is highly intelligent, magically powerful, and an excellent negotiator. The last one we're told more than shown. Her bodyguard, Lily, is a female knight who's also a priestess of the earth goddess (as is the princess), just as magically powerful and absurdly good at fighting. The princess's uncle, the crown prince, is malevolent, ill-tempered and apparently not very bright, but he is an effective political plotter; he's had Elisa's aunt, his sister, killed because she supported their other brother (Elisa's father) for the throne. He thinks that if he also has Elisa killed after a rigged trial by combat for a false accusation of treason, it will reduce support for her father, because Elisa is popular with the people; this is why I say he's not very bright, since anyone should know the effect would be the opposite.

After Lily defeats a never-before-defeated champion in the trial by combat, the two women leave the city for their own safety, heading for the neighbouring kingdom, where one of the princes has offered her marriage; she's met him previously and likes him. Their party is a mix of loyal people from their faction and people forced on them by wicked Uncle Logan, with predictable issues ensuing. There's a lot of fighting, some of it desperate against hordes of monsters, a mercenary company disguised as bandits, and internal treachery, some of it in display matches to increase Lily's and hence Elisa's reputation in her new kingdom.

I appreciated that Elisa wasn't presented as a perfect heroine; she's too focused on power and neglects or uses her "best friend" Lily while pursuing it, and she becomes more aware of it as the book progresses, not least because another character confronts her with it. I also appreciated that being attracted to someone wasn't an automatic route to romance with that person, but might lead to deciding not to pursue that option for good reasons - a realistic situation I don't see represented often enough in fiction. These elements lifted the book a little above the herd - and it's a vast herd - of other stories like this, and give me hope that it may be a series worth following. The author is inexperienced, needs to show more and tell less, and could stand to free himself a bit more from the tropes of the genre, but I found this an enjoyable book of its kind.

There are three levels of bandwagon fiction in my classification, and this is the mildest one, which I call "If you like this sort of thing, this is definitely one." (The other two, in ascending order of unoriginality, are "made from box mix" and "extruded fiction product".) Though it definitely has its flaws, it shows some promise.

I was very excited to read this book because I got it as an ARC, but unfortunately, I am rating it one star. While others may love this book I just couldn't get myself to finish it.

Reasons?
- I felt as though the writing kept switching POVs and didn't really make sense to why. One second you're reading someone's thoughts, the next you are in a 3rd POV or suddenly in someone else pov. Mind you, this is all on the same page

- I felt like I was just being told what was happening and not really getting a picture painted

Overall, the writing style just wasn't for me. Again, others may feel differently, however, it just wasn't for me.

Thank you, NetGalley, Tab Stephens, and Atmosphere Press for this ARC in exchange for an honest review

This was a good and interesting read. The characters were quite interesting. Loved the simplistic world building although I didn’t understand the use of magic. Who was allowed to use magic? The humans or only a delft amount of humans? The characters were quite interesting too. Particularly Elisa and her love for power. One thing I didn’t enjoy was the romantic relationships that were going on. Although not the main centaur of attraction, still quite confusing. Good book though.

This is a fun and thrilling fantasy adventure! It has magic, monsters and demihumans and is a very quick and engaging read. I really liked the main character Elisa and I loved that her knight was a girl