Rise of a Hero

by Hilari Bell

Reviewed by Coral

The Hrum have 8 months left before the conquest of Farsala must be complete. If not, their laws say they must offer terms to Farsala and return everything that was taken as loot, both people and property. But with the deghans’ army defeated, there isn’t much left in the way of resistance.

Farsala’s only hope lies with three very different people: Jiaan, the bastard son of a deghan who commands the small amount of men who survived the opening battle of the war; Kavi, who has started to question the merits of trading one set of rulers for another and who can command the loyalty of a large number of the country’s peasants and workers; and Soraya, Jiaan’s spoiled half-sister, who infiltrates a Hrum camp with hopes of saving her mother and younger brother from slavery.

I enjoyed this book, for the most part. It was a good follow-up to the first book and it definitely makes you want to read the third book, but there were some minor things that I could have done without.

While I thought it was an interesting idea to have snippets of the story told from a point of view in the future, where Jiaan, Kavi and Soraya’s actions have become merged together into a legend, I think it should have been used less. Every three chapters we get a small future based chapter, which seems like too much. It was a little annoying to reread everything I had just read but told in a different way. If it was only at the beginning and ending of the book, it would have worked better for me.

I’ve known the journey Soraya’s was meant to take since book one, the evolution from spoiled brat to heroine, but it is a slow moving journey. Her chapters were hard to read at the beginning but by the end of the book I feel she’s reached a decent enough place that it won’t be like that in the third book.

Kavi is my favourite character out of the three, but I didn’t really understand his change of heart at the beginning of the book. It is kind of explained better later on, but it still feels a little out of the blue.

The book has a strange feel to it where we are supposed to be hoping that Farsala can save itself but where so much of the book is spent on pointing out that there are many people, in Farsala, in already conquered nations and in nations that will be conquered by the Hrum, where the Hrum are really the lesser of two evils.

This is kind of where I have problems with the Jiaan character, because he’s seen this but is so stubborn in really understanding this information.

I have no idea how I would like to see this series end, but I hope it ends on a positive note for Kavi.

Grade: B