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94 points, 4 ¾ stars.

Quote:

"If you can love her, you can love. If you can love, you can be touched by the Light of God, even if you are blooded by the Enemy."

Review:
Goddamn. So good. This was so, so good. So much of this is what I have been wanting for ages.

I was a bit thrown off by the beginning of the book. Into the Darklands ended up on such a big cliffhanger, and the beginning of Children of the Blood was just following this random kid with a shit life in the same world. It wasn't until about a third of the way through the book that we even catch up to where we left the cliffhanger off on. I was also a bit annoyed at this beginning because it was very similar to the beginning of the previous book - learning about the childhood of a character.

However, this book also got me real good. I just had tears streaming down my face for a while there while reading. And I was happy for the crying. It was a slow and silent sort of tears, the kind you barely notice as you watch the atrocities on unfold on the page. It was beautiful.

In a way I liked the new character, Darin, and in a way I also didn't. He was young and everything, still growing and everything, but his personality seemed to completely change midway through the book. And it changes exactly when the author needed it to, with very little hint of the changes before they happened. In fact, I really liked the Darin of the first half of the book, while the second half just didn't work for me. In the first half, Darrin was just trying to survive, struggling against the injustices. In the second half... well that wasn't a problem anymore.

The highlight, of course, was Sara/Erin and Stefanos. They both changed, but in completely understandable ways that made sense. Sara/Erin is without her memories of the past, and Stefanos is playing Dark Lord, but not First of the Dark. Yet their love for each other is ( )

Review of entire series posted under [b:Chains of Darkness, Chains of Light|437678|Chains of Darkness, Chains of Light (The Sundered, Book 4)|Michelle Sagara West|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1174768950s/437678.jpg|426541]. ( )

I first found this book in 1992 when in Canada, and enjoyed it very much. It seems the series was not widely available back in the UK because I never found the follow on books, although I looked often.

Recently the series has been republished and I filled in my gaps. This book is the best of the series I think, as the following two books could probably have been compressed into one. Still, well worth reading. ( )

Early Michelle West, you can see the seeds of what is going to be a shit hot fantasy writer and world builder but here the writing is still quite young. Point of view and exposition problems.