Tag Archives: Jasmine Giacomo

Adventure, Fantasy, Romance, Young Adult

Giacomo, Jasmine: Oathen (Legend of the Shanallar) (2011)

2013-05-15 humanitysdarkerside 1 Comment

The end of The Wicked Heroine left Meena in a sticky place. We now discover how she gets out of it. Definitely one of the novel’s high points and humorous at that. If you are a proper young adult you will like the grossness of the scene (especially if you have a good imagination). “… his knife skittered against the blade of a short sword jammed up from below” on the bottom of page 3 sets the tone for the rest of Oathen. Jasmine writes grosse well – an excellent and important quality in an author.

Anjoya Meseer (Geret and Salvor’s language teacher) ends up leaving Salience with Count Runcan for Vint. The two of them have a surprise change of of transportation on the way. Anjoya turns out to be important to the political climate in Vint, so hurrah to her for taking a chance on a change in future.

Then we have the love-triangle/quadrangle of Geret, Sanych, Salvor and Rhona who travel with the returned Meena and the chased Gryme/Kemsil. Talk about messy love. I think this was the bit about Legend of the Shanallar that just didn’t do anything for me, but I am not really a romance reader and definitely not a YA one.

Did Oathen have action. I guess that is one way of putting it. Plenty of action and magic. All of them learn what they are made of and Meena finally gets her heart’s desire fulfilled. I think you could say that Oathen had a happy ending – at least for some of the characters. The others, well you learn to live with the choices you have made. Consequences can suck.

At times the story hiccupped, but that happens. Other than that Oathen was a great YA novel (I think, being 48 and all).

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The Romance Reviews

My review of The Wicked Heroine

Adventure, Fantasy, Romance

Giacomo, Jasmine: The Wicked Heroine (Legend of the Shanallar) (2010)

2013-05-14 humanitysdarkerside 1 Comment

It seems Jasmine Giacomo deems her Immortality Archives/Legend of the Shanallar novels adult fantasy. I don’t see it. There is no explicit sex nor explicit violence. Neither are the novels overly dark.

I chose to read The Wicked Heroine exclusively because of the title. I wouldn’t say that our main character (the Shanallar/Meena/Jacasta) is exactly wicked. In my opinion strong, experienced and unwilling to take a whole lot of BS is more descriptive. She makes her choices and faces the consequences of those. Sometimes those consequences are other people being hurt while at other times she is the one getting hurt. Sometimes everyone benefits. As I kept on reading about Meena, I found I liked her more and more.

Another favorite character was Geret Branbrey Valan. Geret is highly intelligent, naive and bored – all poured into one of the nobility. He has the best pranks but understands very little about other people. Maybe he is the one who goes through the most personal changes. I guess you could say that by the end of the duology he has been forced to grow up.

Sanych is another appealing character. Her main flaw is that she is extremely single-minded. Single-mindedness is a great quality if you are willing to learn from your mistakes. It takes her some time but Sanych figures out that despite all her bookish knowledge she too has plenty of real life learning to do.

Off the three of them go to find The Dire Tome, each of them with different motives for joining the journey. Like all heroic journeys there is plenty of action, a lot of death and wicked opponents. The three meet interesting people on their journey. We get to observe a love-triangle or two and the various feelings that go along with love/lust. The various love-triangles were what made surprised that Giacomo has classified her novels as adult. They were more of the kind found in YA novels in my opinion.

This is not a series. The books are not stand-alone but of the serial type. You will have to begin reading The Wicked Heroine for book no. 2 (Oathen) to make sense.

The Wicked Heroine was a fun read.

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