While not every book needs a happy ending to be good, this ending felt a little rushed and felt a bit like, "I've lost everything so I guess I'll just give up." Kind of like a dramatic high schooler who just broke up with their first boyfriend. Nothing else matters so whatever. ( )

When one of your earliest memory is seeing your village and family destroyed, It's fair to say that your way of looking at the world is skewed. This is Reed's beginning. She's rescued by members of the Aristene, an order of mythical female warriors. Each is assigned a hero to keep safe once they have completed training. Unfortunately, each lives much longer that their assigned hero. For some, this serialized savior responsibility comes naturally, and they can roll with the dalliances offered by their male partners but Reed has the misfortune to fall for hers. How that shakes out involves fighting, intrigue, a pretty evil king, and the need to look inward pretty deeply. It's all wrapped into a very satisfying story. ( )

Thank you HarperCollins for the ARC!

Kendare Blake always writes about strong women. The strength of her characters always differs. That strength might be a character's intelligence, athleticism, cunning, compassion, or a mixture. It is what she does, and she does it well.

In Champion of Fate, Ms. Blake introduces us to a society of strong women. These women, the Aristene, remind me of the mythical Amazons with their godlike powers and isolation from the rest of the world, but their goal is to create heroes. From the moment you first meet an Aristene, you know that theirs is a society with many secrets, most of which you will uncover by the story's end.

Our heroine, Reed, is an orphan rescued by the Aristene. Fueled equally by revenge and gratitude, she devotes her life to becoming an Aristene warrior. As is always the case with blind devotion, what Reed discovers once she ventures beyond the protection of the training grounds leaves her questioning her life's purpose, not without good cause.

Still, as much as I wanted to root for Reed and her hard-fought answers, I struggled with Champion of Fate. There is little about the actual plot that bothered me. Instead, all of its issues are in the writing. The pacing is uneven, too slow for the first portion of the story, and much too fast later. There are only so many training stories one wants to read and only so much ceremonial prep and ceremony one can handle. I could have done with less of that and more relationship-building between Reed and her hero-to-be. As it is, Hestion goes from questioning Reed and doubting her abilities to being madly in love with her in one page - way too fast to be believable, let alone enjoyable.

The other area in which I struggled with Champion of Fate is the syntax of the entire novel. Yes, Champion of Fate is a young adult novel, but the sentence structure is too simple. The sentences lack complexity. As someone who appreciates a beautiful sentence for what it conveys and the nuance used to string words together to maximize the message, Ms. Blake's overly simple writing style lacks that nuance. There is no beauty in the writing, just function.

This doesn't mean I won't read the second book when published next year. Champion of Fate ends with a turn I did not see coming but probably should have. While Ms. Blake answers most of our questions about her world, she leaves Reed with several choices and more than one path to follow. I am excited to see what Reed opts to do and how her story and that of the Aristene will end. ( )