Title: Storm Born & Thorn Queen
Author: Richelle Mead
Series: Dark Sawn
Rating: 4/5 Athemes

Premise: Just typical. No love life to speak of for months, then all at once, every horny creature in the Otherworld wants to get in your pants…

Eugenie Markham is a powerful shaman who does a brisk trade banishing spirits and fey who cross into the mortal world. Mercenary, yes, but a girl’s got to eat. Her most recent case, however, is enough to ruin her appetite. Hired to find a teenager who has been taken to the Otherworld, Eugenie comes face to face with a startling prophecy–one that uncovers dark secrets about her past and claims that Eugenie’s first-born will threaten the future of the world as she knows it.

Review: I decided to reread books one and two in this series in order to give myself a bit of a refresher before book three, Iron Crowned came out which was at the end of March (I’m a little behind on, hehe). Plus, any excuse to reread one of my favorite series, right?

This series is a lot of fun, as long as you like semi romantic, paranormal romps. It also throws in quite a bit of fae politics which is the part I really enjoy. The main character Eugenie starts off firmly in the human world, disdaining all things Otherworld (faerie) but the more she learns about the people and the culture, the more she get’s sucked into their world and as a reader you’re right there with her. This is doubly the case in book two, but I’ll try not to go into too much detail because if you haven’t read these books, you definitely should.

Shockingly… or not so much, there’s a love triangle featured heavily through both books. What makes it interesting is for once I’m not entirely sure who I want her to end up with. Both guys have their perks and both call to a different part of who Eugenie is. It’s interesting. Of course, both men are super handsome and charming, and why the hell not? Her reactions to both men are believable and I sometimes can see myself making the same choices she does when she’s got a tough decision to make, when it comes to her men or otherwise.

There is also a decent amount of action in this book, which was well written enough that I didn’t tend to just skim to the end of a fight and hope everyone I liked made it to the end. I have trouble visualizing a lot of action scenes if things get bogged down in each punch and jab and I had no problem here. Of course some of the fight scenes involve epic elemental demons, so that’s some incentive to follow along.

This series get’s pretty dark at one point and while I wasn’t sure I agreed with it at first, you eventually come to realize that it is something Eugenie has to go through in order to progress the series. Definitely not something she should go through as a person, but book three will be interesting because of how things went down. Just you wait.

Overall, this series just goes to show why Richelle Mead is one of my favorites. The plot is fun, the characters are likeable and the series warrants not only a read but apparently a reread or two as well.