Destiny’s Choice (Destiny and Darkness #3) by Karen Frost
- Publisher: Ylva Publishing, September 2nd 2020
- Genre: Young Adult, Fantasy, LGBTQ+
- Format: eARC
- Word Count: 76,000 words
- My Rating: ★★★★ (4/5)
Content warnings: ableism, deaths of secondary characters, kidnapping
If Daughter of Fire shares the theme with the MG/YA fantasy series by a certain transphobic author, Destiny’s Choice feels like an ode to The Lord of the Rings (which I have only watched onscreen).
Knights Asher, Taz, Henrek, Jazmen, and shapeshifter Great Mage Marandir accompany Knight Commander Bronwen (paraplegia) to negotiate for peace with the Souththerners. But no Iliryan has ever came back from the Southlands alive.
[Tayanna] could have been any of these soldiers, […] watching the road for reinforcements that never came. After forty years, there were none left to send. The forest had been cut down. There was no more wood to burn.
I find the events in this plot-driven fantasy a little too random for my taste, but I really enjoy the writing. It reads a little on the literary side compared to most YA fantasies. In previous books, the first-person narration of Aeryn seems detached. Now that this book is in Asher’s third-person perspective, it is surprisingly more emotionally charged not only by Asher but also her comrades.
There are many contrasting notions, parallel ideas, and subtle actions in the plot: Jazmen’s jesting personality, Dark Magic, deaths, Asher’s memory of her love Tayanna, etc. Frost is great at talking about one thing while hinting at another, and I love how this high fantasy manages to stay connected with our world by having a disabled commander, references to dementia, political trickery, never ending wars, etc. Destiny’s Choice is undoubtedly filled with darkness and deaths while laced with a ghost of the love between Asher and Tayanna.
[Asher] should have heard him coming, but she had swum too deep into the pool of her memories to hear the sounds above the surface. She instinctively slapped the chest’s lid shut, protecting Tayanna’s last link to the world of the living. As though if Taz saw the chest’s contents, the fragile link would disappear and be forever lost.
This installment is not a romance. Tayanna had died on the southern front and Asher only revisits their memories together through lucid dreaming. Though there were no ongoing romantic relationships for Asher, the friendship and companionship between her and Taz is wonderful. Her friend Aeryn from Daughter of Fire: The Darkness Rising also plays a relatively important role in this book, but she is more of a shadow of her past self. Having secrets means risking trust, indirectly making this book somewhat of a tragedy.
“One day you’ll see that death isn’t as awful as it seems. It’s like reaching the end of a good book. You might wish there were more to read, but you enjoyed what was there. Your story will write itself every day of your life. At the end, if your story has been full of love and happiness and honor, you’ll have no regret about closing the cover. Or at least, not many regrets.”
Lord Ivar (Asher’s father)
If you also enjoy some good thinking while reading a YA fantasy, Destiny’s Choice is a wonderful book. This one ends again on a cliffhanger, but I’ll be reading book four Death’s Champion (April 2021) for Frost’s writing and not the resolution. [5 Sep 2020]
I received an e-ARC from Ylva Publishing in exchange for an honest review.
