The Shadows Between Us Review

    As a second daughter, Alessandra has been overlooked her whole life. All she craves is power and attention. Her plan: woo the Shadow King, marry him, and kill him. Then she will have an entire kingdom in her grasp. The Shadow King has mysterious powers that no one is quite sure the function or extent of. Alessandra does not care about this, though. She is owed power, and she is determined to get it. However, she will be competing with others as many people want the Shadow King dead. With numerous attempts to kill him taking place, Alessandra must protect him long enough for her plan to fall into place. All the while, she struggles not to let him steal her heart.

    Keep in mind that everyone has their own opinion. This review is only my opinion, and you may have your own, different one. I would take into consideration what I say, but do not make a decision about the book solely based off of this review. Let's begin:

    This book was honestly done really well in so many different aspects. I was maybe not quite as interested in the beginning as I hoped it would be, but the book more than made up for it later on.

    Let's talk about Alessandra. She is great with a couple of minor exceptions. She is a completely badass, smart, strong, independent woman. She does not rely on others for anything and has such a sharp mind that it is unbelievable. Her only downside in my opinion is the reasoning behind her whole plan. I get that she was ignored for most of her life so she craves attention and power. However, it seems a bit extreme to me to plan to trick and then murder someone who had nothing to do with your being ignored. Maybe that's just me, but I did not fully back her plan. 

    I have heard different things about the Shadow King and whether or not people like the way he was introduced. One of the main reasons I hear people were annoyed with him is that we hardly know anything about how his powers work for a good chunk of the book. I personally appreciated the author doing this and think it added a little something extra. The people of the kingdoms he rules over themselves do not know the extent of his powers, including Alessandra. Considering the book is from Alessandra's point of view, it would not make any sense for readers to know the king's powers because that would mean that Alessandra knows. I liked that readers learned about the powers as and in the same way Alessandra does. Also, let's be real, the powers are so worth the wait because of how epic they are (even though they are also extremely flawed).

    The book has so many different layers. There are the things that everyone sees on the surface, but everything goes much deeper, especially the characters. They are all complex and, for the most part, experience a good amount of growth (especially Alessandra and the Shadow King). For example, Alessandra and her motivations for her plan or the Shadow King and his reasons for not letting anyone near him/pushing away people. The only character that I wish we knew more about was Chrysantha. We never actually met her in person and only know the really basic stuff about her. That is probably my biggest critique of the book.

    The story is full of different plot twists and betrayals. I ate up every single one of them because they were just great. I felt like one of the betrayals is something that most people ill probably figure out before it is revealed. There was one other where I had suspicions, but I kept going back and forth because of how everything plays out. I ended up being correct, but I was not disappointed about that because of how unsure I was of my prediction.

    I adored the romance plot line in this book. The slow burn was killing me the entire time! I completely supported the romance and could not wait for it to finally happen. There was so much tension and so many scenes where I thought it was finally happening only for it not to and my heart to shatter. And may, you know, want to throw the book across the room. All of this was in the best possible way though, and I adore the author for making that happen.

    The last 30 or so pages, oh my goodness- SO MUCH HAPPENED. I thought there was no way the author would be able to wrap everything up so quickly after she introduced quite a few plot twists. I guess that just goes to show how smart and cunning this author is because, not only did she do it, she did it masterfully. I could not put the book down at the end I was that invested.

    I am not sure why I liked this so much, but I really enjoyed that there were so many parts of the book formatted as letters. That is all I am going to say because 1) spoilers and 2) I really cannot explain why I enjoyed that as much as I did. Sorry!

    This has nothing to do with the writing itself, but the book was absolutely stunning. I love the design of the cover. When I took that off and saw the actually hardcover, I found out that it is easily the prettiest naked book I have. The roses engraved on the front are beautiful and the spine is gorgeous. I have never seen a prettier spine, nor do I think I ever will in the future. 

    This is not really a big thing, but I have found more and more that I am a map person. I love love love when books include maps. For one, they are pretty. For two, they are extremely helpful, especially when the world is as big as it is in this book. Therefore, I kinda wish there was a map in this book, but it is nothing to get too upset over. I only felt the need to comment on this because I think there could have been some more world building in this book. Since there wasn't a whole lot of that going on, a map would have been useful to keep up.

    Overall, I certainly would recommend this book. With a couple of exceptions, I loved everything about it. I could not be happier that this was what my book club voted on! I now may need to check out other work by this author.

Rating: 5/5 stars

Author: Tricia Levenseller

Publisher: Feiwell and Friends

# of Pages: 324

Genre: YA, Fantasy, Romance

Series: Standalone