Graceling

Graceling by Kristin Cashore

471 pages

Genre: YA, fantasy

Summary (from Amazon): Graceling takes readers inside the world of Katsa, a warrior-girl in her late teens with one blue eye and one green eye. This gives her haunting beauty, but also marks her as a Graceling. Gracelings are beings with special talents—swimming, storytelling, dancing. Katsa's Grace is considered more useful: her ability to fight (and kill, if she wanted to) is unequaled in the seven kingdoms. Forced to act as a henchman for a manipulative king, Katsa channels her guilt by forming a secret council of like-minded citizens who carry out secret missions to promote justice over cruelty and abuses of power.

Why I Read: This has been a very popular book in the blogsphere so I wanted to read it.

Thoughts: I fell in love with this book very quickly; after only one chapter, I knew I loved the world and wanted to find out everything. Katsa is awesome-she has such amazing power and she grows and becomes more confident of herself. I am in awe of some of the things she does in this book, although most of it is possible due to her magical power. Then there is Po, her love interest (not a spoiler-it's very obvious). He is very cool and supportive of her. He believes in her and gives her additional strength-I love him! I thought the villains were lacking-I prefer one to be confronted at the end whereas this has closer to two who are dealt with separately. There are also many pages where not much seems to happen but I found it all so enjoyable that I did not mind.

Overall: 4.5 out of 5. Great story and very engaging although I would have liked a slightly different ending.

Note: There were a few serious grammatical errors but it did not detract from my enjoyment of it.

Cover: I think the cover is very stunning although I don't know if I would have picked it based on the cover alone.

Coming tomorrow: Review of Fire, a companion novel!