Shattered Realms Series Wrap

The Shattered Realms by Cinda Williams Chima consists of four books: Flamecaster, Shadowcaster, Stormcaster, and Deathcaster. You can see my full review of the first book, Flamecaster, here.

After reading The Heir Chronicles and the Seven Realms series and enjoying both, I had high hopes for this series; unfortunately I was disappointed. These books just didn't engage me as much as the other books by Chima and there were so many points of view and so many things going on that it was almost Game of Thrones-ish, but less well written.

The Books

You might see some minor spoilers ahead of here!

Shadowcaster - 2.5 stars

- Shadowcaster just didn't engage me the way Flamecaster did. Firstly, we were introduced to a dragon at the end of the first book in this series, and there is almost no dragon content in Shadowcaster. Secondly, the actual title and its subject only come up about once. If I'm reading a book called Shadowcaster, I wanna know who the shadowcaster is. It was mentioned once, but it just didn't fit well enough with the rest of the book to fit with the title. Thirdly, I missed the characters from Flamecaster. I believe that the events of Shadowcaster are loosely concurrent with those of Flamecaster so it makes sense why the characters aren't repeated, but I was looking forward to more content with those characters and I didn't get it.

Stormcaster - 2.5 stars

- Similar to Shadowcaster, I didn't get what I was looking for in this book. Again, the events in this third book are partially concurrent to the first and second books, and I got a little bit of time with characters from those books, but we got into new characters and all sorts of different schemes and sub-plots that were difficult to keep track of. The timeline itself was difficult to keep track of, as sometimes it jumped ahead or back several months or years. Also, while I knew who the stormcaster was, he didn't cast any storms.

Deathcaster - 3 stars

- This final instalment in the Shattered Realms series was a bit more enjoyable than the middle two. Finally the disparate story elements started to come together and characters that had been apart, separated by war and circumstance, were brought back together. Characters who were not connected before find themselves united against a common enemy. There were some cliché tropes in this series that I didn't love - enemies to lovers, for example, but not well done. I'm a huge fan of enemies to lovers when it's well written and the journey is clear for both characters, but in this case, it was not. This is the "and they all lived happily ever after" book that I really hoped wouldn't be coming. Especially in a book that sees the end of a decades-long war, it's just not believable for every character to come out relatively unscathed and united with their true love. It was a bit too cliché for my tastes. Give me a happy ending that shows the path to happiness ahead, not the negation of all that the characters were fighting for.

Characters

These books have 7 main points of view that are followed: Adrian sul'Han, aka Ash aka Adam Freeman aka Adam Wolf; Alyssa ana'Raisa, aka Lyss, aka the Gray Wolf, aka Captain Gray; Breon d'Tarvos, aka the busker; Jenna Bandelow (who has several aliases but none of them last long enough to be worth mentioning); Halston Matelon; Evan Strangward; and Destin Karn. These characters are all related somehow - Alyssa and Adrian are siblings, Jenna and Adrian fall in love, Breon accidentally participates in a conspiracy to kill Alyssa, etc. However, it was at times difficult to keep track of who knows who and what's going on where. The different points of view were not sufficiently different enough for me to remember always whose point of view we were in - they were all written in the same style, which made it difficult to know.

I couldn't find much in the way of fanart for this series, so you'll just have to read the series if you want to know what the characters look like :P

Here's my map. It's not as detailed as some of the other ones I've done, so it might seem like the characters were less complicated to follow, but so many of them were "main" characters that it got confusing. There were many minor characters that I did not include.

Overall Rating

Overall, this was a 3 star series for me. They were not my favourite of Chima's work, but still engaging enough that I didn't despair of never finishing them. I would recommend these cautiously to fans of The Seven Realms, or to any high fantasy readers upwards of 14 years old. They wouldn't be my first recommendation, but they'd be in the list somewhere. One of the redeeming factors for this series is that there is some LGBTQ content, so that's why I've given it 3 stars instead of 2.5.