Unraveling Words: Unraveling: Sora's Quest by T.L. Shreffler

Title: Sora's Quest

Series: The Cat's Eye Chronicles Book One

Author: T.L. Shreffler
Genre: YA Fantasy

Publication Date: April 18, 2012

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Sora Fallcrest always dreamed of adventure, but as a member of the nobility, she learned the ways of a Lady instead. Now seventeen, she is expected to choose a husband and marry. She plots to run away, but just as she is stepping out the door, she runs into a mysterious man--and is kidnapped.

Abducted from her manor, Sora is plunged into a world of magical races, arcane jewelry and forgotten lore. She finds herself at the mercy of a dangerous assassin, haunted by an even darker past. She yearns for freedom, but he won't let her go--not when her Cat's Eye necklace is the only thing that can save his life.

But the necklace itself presents a problem. It is an ancient device from the long forgotten War of the Races, and its magic has the ability to steal souls. Can Sora learn to wield its power -- or will the power wield her?

***

My Thoughts

I guess you could say I had high expectations for this series. It's a fantasy, there is an assassin involved. I was sold from the get-go. The raving reviews just solidified my resolve to read this. I was expecting it to be awesome. It wasn't.

It wasn't bad, but I wanted better. Let me break it down so I can make it easier.

World-building (3.5/5): It wasn't as lush and detailed as it could be/wanted it to be, but it was more than decent enough. We get told of different races, the War of the Races, the destruction by the humans (Damn humans!) with the Cat's Eye. We get to meet some of them as well. 2 of our main characters are Wolfies (which is such a cute name!). They reminded me of a blend between Fae and werewolf.

Our assassin, seems to be of a different race entirely and we only get bits and pieces of information about this race in general. I'm hoping for more in the next book. One of the conflicts that out characters go through is fighting the Catlins, which are these huge werecat type of race, that use Earth Magic. As I said, very nice world building, but it could have been exploited a lot more as well.

Characters (2.5/5): Characters are huge for me, and for the life of me I could not like Sora at all. She got a bit more tolerable as the book went on, but just enough that I didn't finally give up on it. She would have single-handedly ruined the whole book for me. The only thing that kept me going and hoping that Sora would get better was the promise of the world-building, but I came SO close to just DNFing it because of her.

She was so naive and plain stupid at times. She liked to think that she wasn't like those snobbish nobles from the City, but she was exactly like them. She was also irrational and I just don't handle irrational characters well. She had this forced hatred towards the men that made me want to strangle her!

They treated her so damn well, even giving her weapons after only like 2 days of being 'kidnapped' and all she did was judge, bitch and whine the whole fucking time. If it had been some kind of plan, that she was masking her brilliance with this act, or getting on their nerves so they would tired of her and just dump her ass, I would have been all for it, but it wasn't! Ugh.

With that said I liked the rest of our gang, Burn, Dorian and specially Crash, just being a badass assassin :)

Plot (2/5): The plot seems too simple? Idk if I'm missing something but the basic thing is, Crash/Viper (the assassin) killed Volcrian's brother as an assignment. Volcrian vows revenge, fails the first time and the chase ensues. So all Crash and the rest of his party are doing is just running from Volcrian, while doing side jobs to keep the money going. That't it. That's the whole of the plot. There is no side issues going on that I can see. Just straightforward revenge.

The pacing (4/5) was quite nice always a sense of urgency, suspense. Always being chased, or chasing. The romance (2/5) was well, idk. There wasn't much of anything really, which I appreciated, but we are getting weird vibes/feelings between Sora and Crash and I just don't think Sora is anywhere good enough for Crash, which is why I don't like where things are going.

So overall it was an enjoyable enough fantasy once you get past the halfway mark (before that Sora was just too plain irritating to enjoy anything else). Would I recommend it? Idk. I'd have to finish the series to see if it was worth starting, but I think I might just find out. Still haven't made up my mind about reading the second book or not.

So...