Heart of Thorns by Bree Barton | Book Review

Title: Heart of Thorns

Author: Bree Barton

Series: Heart of Thorns #1

Genre: Young Adult, Fantasy, High Fantasy, Romance

Publisher: Katherine Tegen Books

Publication date:July 31st, 2018

Pages: 464

My rating:

In the ancient river kingdom, touch is a battlefield, bodies the instruments of war. Seventeen-year-old Mia Rose has pledged her life to hunting Gwyrach: women who can manipulate flesh, bones, breath, and blood.

Not women. Demons. The same demons who killed her mother without a single scratch.

But when Mia’s father suddenly announces her marriage to the prince, she is forced to trade in her knives and trousers for a sumptuous silk gown. Only after the wedding goes disastrously wrong does she discover she has dark, forbidden magic—the very magic she has sworn to destroy.

She learned this from his father during Huntress training. “Sometimes science masquerades as magic,” he’d told her. “But never forget: science requires a cool head. Magic relies on a cruel, unruly heart.”

Argh, the disappointment! I really wanted to love this book. It had everything I usually love in a fantasy, and the premise sounded amazing. And though it wasn’t bad by any means, and I had a good time reading it, nothing really happened in this installment, and it felt more like a prologue than a first book in a trilogy.

The thing is, more than half of the story hardly had any plot at all. It was purely center of our main character’s journey and practically nothing else, and though at times it was pretty interesting to know more about her and her back story, there were others were I was so bored out of my mind. It took a white for me to see the path the story would take, and for the book to be that long, I think there were a lot of unnecessary parts.

The characters were okay but weren’t outstanding, and that made it a little bit harder to enjoy the story, since more than 250 pages were nothing but information about the characters, and their interactions and relationships. I overall enjoyed the development that we saw in our protagonist, because she had a change of mind from the very beginning, but it was soo long.

“To enthrall someone is to enslave them little rose. You’ve stripped them of their consent, robbed them of their choice. And without choice, what are we?”

The romance wasn’t bad, but there was something about it that didn’t make me go head over heals about it. I don’t know, maybe it’s because lately I’m more picky with my romances that I’m becoming more critical, and like I said, even though I enjoyed reading about the relationship between these two characters, I feel not only that it took a bit too much importance over a short period of time, but also that I didn’t fully love it. Still I’m interested to see how that relationship develops in the next installments.

Something that I found super interesting was the magic system. Though I feel in the next installments we’re going to know more about it and in more detailed, I really liked what was introduced to us in this story. It was very intriguing and one of the best things that Heart of Thorn was, and I honestly cannot wait to know what the sequel will bring.

Though it was a slow burning type of story and I don’t mind those, it’s true that because there wasn’t much happening that it became a bit boring once I reached the half mark of the book. And though from that point on it became a bit fast paced and my interest increased, there were some twists and revelations that were a bit predictable and convenient.

Still, despite having a few issues with all those things, the ending kind of redeemed the story a bit for me. I feel that I’m going to enjoy the sequel so much more than this first installment, so I’d be interested to read it, just to see what’s going to happen next.