Review – Reign of the fallen duology

Title: Reign of the fallen & Song of the dead

Author: Sarah Glenn Marsh

Format: Audiobook

Publisher: Razorbill

Publisher audiobook: Penguin Random House Audio

Narrator: Alex McKenna

Release day: January 23^rd 2018 & January 22^nd 2019

Genre: YA fantasy

Rating: 4 stars

Find the summary for reign of the fallen here!

Find the summary for song of the dead here!

What I thought:

I wasn’t planning on reading this duology at all. But then I saw that one of my favourite booktubers (Riley Marie) quite enjoyed it. So I just randomly picked up the audiobook. And I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised.

I did have to get used to the narrator’s voice every time I picked up the audiobook, it was definitely not my fave. She had a bit of a raspy voice, and when she did the ‘voice’ of certain characters it sounded like they were about to start crying.. So maybe reading this book physically is a better approach.

But more about the story. The magic system was really interesting, the colour of your eyes decide which type of magic you are able to do. It felt really original, but it is not really well explained, in my opinion, you just kinda have to figure it out yourself. Which is fine but it made the beginning a bit hard. Since it immediately starts in an action scene. But maybe because the explanation was so vague I kept wanting to continue and figure out what was going to happen.

I really liked the main character! And princess Valoria, she was such a smart and interesting character.

My only ‘complaint’ about the first book is that the ending was quite predictable, and I saw it coming quite early on.

The first book wrapped itself up quite nicely, so I was really curious what would happen in the sequel, so I started it almost immediately after!

I started Song of the dead a week after book one, I had to get used to the narrator’s voice again haha. As I said before I started I didn’t really understand why this sequel existed haha. But now I’m really happy it does exists! It adds so much to the story!

I loved that this started so quickly after the ending of book one! After book one the world was quite ‘ruined’, so it was really nice to see how they dealt with all the problems and how they build the world back up. I really liked that there were more different ‘magic things’ discovered and explored. And we also got to see some other countries, so that was nice.

I still really like almost all the characters. I absolutely love Valoria! She is so kind and smart. Was a bit more annoyed by the main character, Odessa, in this one compared with boko one. Mainly because she was a bit slow with finding some things out, while as reader those things are really obvious.. I also really like Jax, Daniel and Simon (Not sure if that’s how you write his name since I listened haha). There is also a new character that I really started to care about, and then that character died.. (No spoiler, lots of new characters!)

I was really pleasantly surprised by this series, I had heard some mixed things so I didn’t really know what to expect. I’m really happy that I ended up listening to this book. I do recommend reading this physically, since I wasn’t really a fan of the narrator. I will definitely read something else by her in the future!