Kingdom of the Two Moons

by Alexandra Thomashoff

Kingdom of the Two Moons opens with a girl on a cliff deciding not to jump, and it never really lets go of that image. Melody has spent her whole life as property: raised by a fae fixer named Lyrian in the human world, beaten into obedience, and forced to use her strange talent for tracking people down to hunt her own kind for him. The book’s real hook isn’t the world it builds, though there’s a lot of it. It’s what happens once Melody gets taken from one owner and handed straight to a bigger one, and has to figure out whether anything about that trade actually counts as freedom.

The plot moves fast in its first half. Lyrian’s true nature unravels almost immediately once Riven, a high lord serving the fae world’s Dark Lord, Caryan, comes to collect Melody on his king’s orders. Caryan, it turns out, has been searching for her for twenty years: she’s named in an ancient prophecy as the one who will “end the blight,” and Caryan himself, an immortal angel who absorbed a genocidal witch queen’s power to escape her, has every reason to think that blight is him. Melody is pulled into Caryan’s court as a slave in every literal sense, caught between his obsessive, controlling fixation on her and Riven’s quieter, genuinely protective devotion, while a splinter faction of winged assassins hunts her to stop Caryan from using her talent to find three lost artifacts capable of ending the brewing war between his kingdom and the elven one next door. A parallel thread follows Blair, a disgraced witch sent to retrieve or kill Melody, whose own chapters (present-day and two-years-before flashbacks) trace a much older, much sadder story about what it costs to survive a genuinely evil ruler. The book builds toward a climax in which Caryan, desperate to keep Melody alive and useful, forces dangerous magic into her against her will, and ends on Melody and Blair’s escape attempt going badly wrong mid-air, with no resolution in sight.

Read the review Kingdom of the Two Moons