Name: Servant of Earth
Series: The Shards of Magic #1
Author: Sarah Hawley
Publisher: Gollancz
Format: Kindle (through Kindle Unlimited)
Genres: Adult, Romantasy
Spice Rating: 🌶️🌶️🌶️
Rating:
Synopsis: Goodreads
In the underground Fae realm, only the strongest and most ruthless have power-but a young human woman forced into a life of servitude is about to change everything.
Kenna Heron is best known in her village for being a little wild-some say “half feral”–but she’ll need every ounce of that ferocity to survive captivity in the cruel Fae court.
Trapped as a servant in the faeries’ underground kingdom of Mistei, Kenna must help her new mistress undertake six deadly trials, one for each branch of Fire, Earth, Light, Void, Illusion, and Blood. If she succeeds, her mistress will gain immortality and become the heir to Earth House. If she doesn’t, the punishment is death-for both mistress and servant.
With no ally but a sentient dagger of mysterious origins, Kenna must face monsters, magic, and grueling physical tests. But worse dangers wait underground, and soon Kenna gets caught up in a secret rebellion against the inventively sadistic faerie king. When her feelings for the rebellion’s leader turn passionate, Kenna must decide if she’s willing to risk her life for a better world and a chance at happiness.
Surviving the trials and overthrowing a tyrant king will take cunning, courage, and an iron will… but even that may not be enough.
Review:
I have been excited to read Servant of Earth for months at this point! So, tell me why I was unfortunate enough to finally pick it up right as I fell into a reading slump… Damn.
Servant of Earth was getting raving positive reviews everywhere, to the point I almost purchased the Fairyloot special editions without having read the books because I was that convinced I’d love them (spoiler, I regret not buying them!). But then, when I started reading it, I began struggling immediately with the pacing of it. And due to the reading slump I hadn’t quite realised I was in yet, I declared myself bored and put the book down around the 43% mark…
Thankfully I picked it back up!! Because whilst yes I struggled with the pacing, the story is brilliant! It took me till 85% when I finally had a theory that felt possible… and then I when I got to those final moments I realised I couldn’t have even predicted how that was going to go down… ever. Servant of Earth was brilliant. It took me three weeks to read the first 50%, but the second 50% I read in TWO DAYS! It’s ‘another romantasy with trials’ but it’s absolutely not just that!
Our FMC, Kenna, finds herself crossing the bog into the fae realm to protect her best friend and once there she finds her life threatened from more than one angle and as a result she finds herself assisting a fae through the trials that she needs to complete in order to have a chance at gaining their full magic and immortality. Kenna is in a world she doesn’t know, filled with species she’s never encountered before, not to mention magic that she has no experience with… Yikes!
The court politics are excellent – and I love the world lore we get through this, the world felt bigger than what we were being presented, which only means there is more possibilities in the next book and final book (I believe this is a trilogy, though I could be wrong!). And the characters each had reasons to tug on my emotions for one reason for another… I don’t think we met a named character that I didn’t feel something for (I’m not saying if that something was necessarily positive or negative…). I just wish I had read it all outside of the reading slump…
Pacing issues aside, this story was excellent – and I can absolutely see why everyone was raving about it. And I really believe if it hadn’t been for the slump that meant I didn’t get on totally with the first half, this would have probably been a 4.5 star rating (pacing being the only issue!). And I debated giving it that rating regardless, but the first half of this book was truly a case of right book wrong time for me… and I have to honor how I felt while reading it (which wasn’t great).
So, brilliant book, definitely read at the wrong time by me (which I will forever be annoyed about) however I know book 2 is going to be better for me and I’m very much excited for book 2!
“The danger in looking at the wrong people, Kenna, is that sometimes they want to look back.”
Reading With Tyler 
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