Ructious Rift

Rift by Andrea Cremer

3 gnomes and a gnome hat out of 5 gnomes

I love the world and characters that Andrea Cremer created in Nightshade.  Rift is a prequel to the Nightshade series and occurs long before the characters of the first book are even born.  

I really wish that this book hadn’t been written after the fact of the original series.  It feels weird already knowing who the bad guys are. This means that some of the tension is just kind of drained out.

I also wish that I had before reading Rift, read the novella Aftermath by Andrea Cremer that takes place shortly after the events of the third book. I have to highly recommend reading Aftermath because it gives some great clues as to what happened in the prequel and what’s going to possibly happen next in the world of Nightshade.

The new protagonist for this book, Ember, is one strong-willed girl who doesn’t exactly have many choices seeing as she lives in Scotland in the year 1404.  She is pledged to the Conatus order which means she’s always known that she’s going to have a very different life.  Ember looks forward to being out of her father’s house and just worries about how her sister will now fare.

I like Ember’s attitude but she really is a tad naive when it comes to her friend Alistair.  Anyone else with eyes (aka anyone reading the book) can tell that he likes her a lot and definitely wants to be more than friends. Who it looks like she’s going to end up feels like a no duh type of moment too but at least their relationship feels more natural.  

It’s great seeing Ember grow into being a warrior and all the training that she has to go through.  The weapon she ends up with is cool too, it reminded me of those rings that were used by Xena warrior princess.  

Seeing all the pieces fall into place really builds momentum towards the end of the book.  The ending is the best part because the action revs up more and leaves you wondering what is going to happen next and how/if everything can be all right again.  

I'm looking forward to the next book and seeing just how everything works out among all this chaos.