Title: Kingdom of Souls
Author: Rena Barron
Pages: 496
Published by: HarperVoyager
Release date: 19th September 2019
Synopsis:
Magic has a price—if you’re willing to pay.Born into a family of powerful witchdoctors, Arrah yearns for magic of her own. But each year she fails to call forth her ancestral powers, while her ambitious mother watches with growing disapproval.
There’s only one thing Arrah hasn’t tried, a deadly last resort: trading years of her own life for scraps of magic. Until the Kingdom’s children begin to disappear, and Arrah is desperate to find the culprit.
She uncovers something worse. The long-imprisoned Demon King is stirring. And if he rises, his hunger for souls will bring the world to its knees… unless Arrah pays the price for the magic to stop him
Pre-order from: Amazon | Book Depository | Waterstones | Goldsboro (exclusive edition)
Firstly, I want to say thank you to the publisher for sending me a copy of Kingdom of Souls to review via Netgalley!
Review:
I want to begin by saying that I ended up putting Kingdom of Souls down at 30% of the way through. However, this in no way means that the book was bad! It’s just that it wasn’t for me this time and it did have a lot of good points.
The main reason I think that Kingdom of Souls didn’t click for me was down to the pacing and the writing style. I found that there was a lot of information to take in in a short amount of text which made it difficult for me to keep up, and the pacing feel off. I had hoped to push through the rest of the book in the hopes that I might start enjoying it more, but as it was taking me a long time to get through it, I found that I was forgetting details and decided that it might just be best for me to put it down.
HOWEVER, during the 30% of the book I read, I was really intrigued by and impressed with the magic system and I loved the inclusion of Witchdoctors. I thought that the world that Barron has created was wonderfully rich and vivid and the story is really unique.
There’s been a lot of hype around Kingdom of Souls, and I completely get why. And although it didn’t work for me, I know that it’s a book that so many people are going to connect with and love, which makes me happy. I definitely encourage others to read it! (And let’s all take a moment to appreciate that COVER).
Rating: ★★★
The Anatomy of a Bookworm 
I liked it. I had fun with it Great review
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Thank you! I’m so glad you enjoyed it!
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I’m currently 14% through this book… but I’ve been 14% for a couple of weeks now. I agree that there is a big info dump happening at the beginning of the story, and I desperately try to keep up with it, but unless I make a vocabularly or something I won’t be able to. This is distarcting me a little bit from the main plot, which is very interesting.
Also, I wasn’t sure what that “God talk” chapter was about… I guess I’m at the point where I want to understand everything but only understand like 20% 😀
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I’m glad it wasn’t just me! I was finding it really difficult keeping up with everything. I think I remember which part you’re talking about there – it seemed to appear out of nowhere but I just put it down to the eARC formatting! I hope you do end up enjoying it, I look forward to seeing what you think! 😀
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