Hello everyone. Welcome back to Bibliophilia Book Reviews. Today I will review In Shadows We Fall by Devin Madson. This book is a prequel novella to The Vengeance Trilogy by the same author. Click here to learn more about this author’s books. This review has spoilers.
You don’t have to believe in fate. Fate believes in you.
In Shadows We Fall is set in the Imperial Expanse of Kisia, where Emperor Lan is bent on making his concubine, Jingyi, his new wife. But Empress Li isn’t going out without a fight, and she seeks to stop the emperor from signing a new alliance that could tear the entire empire apart before she is cast out. Born a Chiltean princess, Kisia’s northern neighbor and ally after her marriage, Empress Li is considered both a foreigner in Kisia’s court and a woman out of her prime after having given the emperor five children. The eldest and the heir to the Crimson Throne, Yarri, is his father’s heir more than he is her son, but Takehiko, the youngest of the boys, is hers. And therein lies Empress Li’s true downfall, for Takehiko, despite having been formally recognized as the emperor’s son, is not really Emperor Lan Otaku’s son. He is the son of Empress Li and Lord Nyraek Laroth, the former General of the Imperial Guard. And Takehiko, like his father, is an Empath, but unlike Lord Laroth, who can sense a person’s emotions with one touch, Takehiko’s power goes beyond. He can both sense a person’s emotions without having to touch them and kill them when he does. And at first, Empress Li uses him and his powers to know if her enemies are lying to her but when she realizes that Takehiko can kill a person with one touch, it frightens her. She doesn’t want to admit it, but she knows that Takehiko’s power can wreak havoc if it is not controlled and that scares her. Empress Li’s fate, however, is to die before her thirtieth year. And with her, her children. And with their own deaths, the empire will burn. So, she is doing everything in her power to prevent that. But you cannot escape fate…
In shadows we fight. In shadows we fall.
In Shadows We Fall is the winner of the 2017 Aurealis Award for Best Fantasy Novella, and it is a very well deserved accolade. The story sets the stage for the first book of The Vengeance Trilogy and I highly recommend you read this novella before picking up The Blood of Whisperers, which is set 16 years after the events in this book. I have to admit though that I had to read In Shadows We Fall twice in order to understand completely what was going on. Yes, it is a 100-page novella, but it is also a book full of political intrigue, action, and war; on the one hand, it is the story of a woman fighting to survive but on the other it is also the story of an empire in crisis and those fighting to keep it alive; the story of a coup, and its brilliance is that we don’t even see the coup happening until it has already happened. The fact that I had to read this book twice however does not mean that that will happen to you; this was just part of my personal experience reading this book, but that didn’t stop me from enjoying it any less the second time around. In fact, I couldn’t put it down.
Needless to say, I really liked this novella, and that is saying something because I’m not real big on short novels. But I decided to give this one a try because I was curious of its Asian-inspired setting and I had been wanting to read a good series with such a setting for a while now. I was not disappointed. It is a very quick read, and after I read it I was surprised to find out that it barely had any reviews on Goodreads. Later, I found out that the three books of The Vengeance Trilogy were originally self-published, and that Orbit later picked them up, hence the change of covers but I was not surprised about that at all either.
I gave this book a New Favorite rating and I will definitely continue on with the series.
