Antonia Bernardin

I recently read Daughter of No Worlds by Carissa Broadbent, which was the 76th book I read this year. This author is most well known for her series The Crowns of Nyaxia, which is The Serpent and the Wings of Night and The Ashes and the Star Cursed King. I really enjoyed those books, so I was really hoping this would live up to them.

A plot summary attempt

The story opens with the moment when Tisaanah is taken from everything she knows as a child and sold into slavery, saved from going to the mines like the rest of her family because of her magic and her beauty. The story jumps into the future when she is an adult, where she is owned by a powerful and wealthy man and made to dance in his clubs. It’s during one of these performances that a generous tip from a patron, which is the only part of her earnings that she’s allowed to keep, finally gets her to the price her master set for her freedom. When she goes to buy her freedom he becomes enraged, nearly whipping her to death, except Tisaanah accidentally ends up killing him with her magic instead.

She escapes, leaving across the sea to pursue her dream of joining one the magical Orders. They agree to train her but she must complete an apprenticeship first, Tisaanah is keen to return to the place she was enslaved with the power of the Order to free them all, so she manages to convince them to let her take her exams early. To her dismay, however, there’s only one person left to train her: Maxcentarius. Max is as estranged from the Orders as you can be as someone still under oath to them and at first he refuses to train her, until her learns of her past and why she’s so desperate to become a full fledged member. As he trains her Tisaanah discovers that Max has a lot of secrets from the last war behind his reasons for hating the Orders but even his distrust of them cannot dissuade her from her plan, too many people sacrificed to get her to this point. With war coming to their borders again and the Order’s interest in Tisaanah somehow tied up in this war, Max doesn’t realises the past is repeating itself until it’s too late.

My review

As you can tell by how hard this book was to summarise, there is a lot to it! I really enjoyed this book, the world is so rich, the magic system is different to a lot of other book around at the moment and I really loved the characters. Tisaanah is more than just some one dimensional book heroine, her magic isn’t unusually remarkable, her journey isn’t smooth. She is funny and smart, stubborn to her own detriment and the way her and Max’s relationship changes is really beautiful, so is the way Max himself starts to change. This is maybe a little dense to consume as an audio like I did, if you aren’t a regular audio listener but I really enjoyed it, especially as it got me through a particularly long drive on the boring UK motorways. I’ll definitely be continuing this series and I’ll be hunting for more Carissa Broadbent books.