Valley – Stacey McEwan

Published By: Angry Robot
Pages: 400
Released On: 10/09/2024

“All things find a way back home.”

At the bottom of the Chasm, Dawsyn and her followers traipse through the darkness to find their long-awaited home. But there are whispers all around them and safety is never guaranteed. With her powers much depleted, and food supplies running low, will they even survive the journey?

Above, the Queen and the new King of Glacia still bay for Dawsyn’s blood, and they will not stop in their quest to destroy her. And with the help of someone Dawsyn thought her friend, they creep ever closer.

Long-buried secrets will be revealed, hearts will be broken and a new day will dawn. Who will reign in this climactic conclusion to the epic Glacian Trilogy?

*****

Thanks to NetGalley and Angry Robot for the advanced copy of this title in return for an honest review.

I feel so conflicted with this review, and I don’t like it because this series has been so good, I’ve loved it. But this fell short of what I was expecting.

Ledge was a brilliantly unique opener, full of action and romance and fantasy.
Chasm was a wonderful follow-up, full of conversation and emotion.

I really hoped that Valley would be a combination of the two.

Let me start with the positives.

I always worry with a series that I will have forgotten what happened at the end of the previous book, and then be completely lost at the start of the next. I admit, I had forgotten what happened at the end of book two. But it didn’t really matter. It goes straight in and all of a sudden you’re back with these familiar people in a familiar situation.

It’s a mixture of fantasy and action, adventure, romance, and travel. There’s elements of thriller, and bizarrely, it has a historical feel to it, even though it’s not really historical, it’s fantasy, but there were elements that I found I enjoyed that I normally find in historical novels.

I would have liked it to have started a bit faster. For the first sort of 40-45% of it, it’s just talking and walking and sleeping, and whilst I understand that’s important in the whole context of the book, for me, it felt like it went on just a bit too long without much happening. Halfway through things start happening and whilst that’s good, I felt it needed a slightly quicker transition.

Whist I enjoyed all three books and it’s definitely a series I would recommend, I think the first book was by far the best, and it sort of dwindled from there. They didn’t get bad, no, nothing is bad about them, just for my taste, it peaked at book one and the rest have been trying to build this story around it and it never quite reached those heights again.

Some reviews had said there was a twist in the second half of the book and I was looking forward to hat it could be as I felt it needed something meaty. But when I got to what I assume was the twist, I was disappointed. It didn’t feel like enough of a twist, more just something added in the hope it would make it a bit more thrilling.

I didn’t gel with the characters as much in this book. They felt flat. There was nothing new about them, and they’d lost that thing that made them interesting.

It got better as it went on, I just with the final event had taken place a little earlier to keep me hooked.

I suppose, overall, for me, it had just lost its magic. Still good, and I’m still glad I read it, and it’s still a fabulous series, but it just didn’t have that same spark I had come to expect.