4 Star #Review of The Oathbreaker's Shadow (The Knots Sequence, #1) by @amymcculloch

Fifteen-year-old Raim lives in a world where you tie a knot for every promise that you make. Break that promise and you are scarred for life, and cast out into the desert.
Raim has worn a simple knot around his wrist for as long as he can remember. No one knows where it came from, and which promise of his it symbolises, but he barely thinks about it at all—not since becoming the most promising young fighter ever to train for the elite Yun guard. But on the most important day of his life, when he binds his life to his best friend (and future king) Khareh, the string bursts into flames and sears a dark mark into his skin.

Scarred now as an oath-breaker, Raim has two options: run, or be killed.

A gripping YA action-adventure fantasy, the first part of a planned duology. 

 About the Author

Amy McCulloch is a Canadian living in London, who fits writing around work as a Editorial Director at one of the UK's leading children's publishers. 

She was bitten by the travel bug at an early age while accompanying her parents on buying trips around the world for their oriental carpet business. It was this love of travel that inspired her to set a novel in a hot, desert location (moving to freezing Ottawa, Canada, where her first winter hit -40°C, might have had something to do with that too). She studied Medieval and Old English literature at the University of Toronto. 

At the beginning of 2011, she signed with the amazing Juliet Mushens of The Agency Group for her debut YA fantasy-adventure novel The Oathbreaker’s Shadow. Random House Children’s Books UK and Doubleday Canada published in June 2013. Flux Books will be bringing the series to the USA in Winter 2015.

This book had some great magical elements that really reminded me of the oaths via Harry Potter with their unbreakable vows.  In this one they use knots to show an oath and if you break an oath you are haunted by the person who you broke the oath to as well as exiled to the desert.  So when main character Raim breaks an oath by accident he has to either be killed or run away.  

I really loved how this book flowed.  The world building ws great as well. The story was great and kept my attention.  And I will be picking up book two.  

The only things I didnt like were the info dumps we got when new characters popped up.  It slowed the story down. It was also slow to start.  The author did a lot of history to begin with that we really didnt need. I would have liked to know more about how the magic system worked etc.  

In the end this book was set up as a series and would not work as a stand alone.  Raim has to set out to find the person who did the org. knot and his journey gets bogged down by side stories.  So he never really finds anything out.  

 Go Into This One Knowing 

Series book, slow start, story bogged down by side stories and other characters. 

"All opinions are 100% honest and my own." 

 

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Posted in: 4 Stars, Netgalley, RandomHouse, Review, Young Adult