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A review by sistermagpie
Daughter of Gods and Shadows by Jayde Brooks
2.0
This was a really hard book to get into, because it was more like a game of chess than interactions between characters. There was a backstory about Ancients who were destroyed by a demon in a war, but the leader of the good guys created a daughter who was The One who could destroy him...only she wound up destroying the whole world as well. Now all of them--Ancients, Shifters, Weres, Vampires, Seers--etc. are in our world. So that totally foreign world that was destroyed was populated by familiar earth folklore--with the requisite snark about humans Get It Wrong, of course. That heroine who destroyed everything has been reincarnated as a young woman in Brooklyn and the demon is back. Oh, and she has a Guardian who was in love with her in the past so now he's in love with her again.
The book has a lot of lines about how the heroine can't wrap her mind around the awesomeness of what she's supposed to do, but that sort of thing just has the opposite effect that it's going for. She's trying to tell us how huge it is, but as a reader it's just pretty standard. You're The One. You've been assigned Tasks to get Weapons to save World. You're very special but totally not free. Even her great love is just assigned to her--it's unclear whether her former self would seem like a different person or not since it seems she, also, was defined by the same burden of Destiny and fear that she was going to Become The Thing She Hates. etc.
The book has a lot of lines about how the heroine can't wrap her mind around the awesomeness of what she's supposed to do, but that sort of thing just has the opposite effect that it's going for. She's trying to tell us how huge it is, but as a reader it's just pretty standard. You're The One. You've been assigned Tasks to get Weapons to save World. You're very special but totally not free. Even her great love is just assigned to her--it's unclear whether her former self would seem like a different person or not since it seems she, also, was defined by the same burden of Destiny and fear that she was going to Become The Thing She Hates. etc.