To make things worse, his wife is also dead and he’s trying to bring her back to life. So, Adrian’s brother dies but he doesn’t know how or why, only that his father sent him to a foreign land where he died and now everything has fallen on his shoulders. They follow a religion that values life above everything else, and this even goes so far as to never speak of those who have died… the reasoning being that if the goddess finds you worthy, she will give you eternal life, and there are Sentinels, priest like people of this world, who are like hundreds of years old. So, Adrian has found himself as the new heir to a kingdom that doesn’t allow people to talk about their dead. You don’t know exactly what happens when she loses her control, but she thinks everyone around her will die if she gets too overwhelmed and loses herself to others’ emotional input. It makes her a really good scout and hunter because she can sense where people are and what their intentions may be, but she can also become overwhelmed. She’s also struggling with what she calls a curse, the ability to sense what other people are feeling. So, the Ronar value strength and doing the hard thing and so Nasha murders a lot of people while assuring herself she’s not a monster.

She’s tried very, very hard to rid herself of the title “sloper” and to be accepted into a clan known as the Ronar. Nasha is kind of like this tribal woman who’s from an area known as the “slopes” but that’s not exactly a good thing. So, we’ve got three POVs, Nasha, Adrian, and Lynn. I do enjoy it, but it does take brainpower I don’t always have the time or investment for, it’s actually been a while since I’ve had a book this dense and complicated. So, I usually harp on about characters telling things they already know for the reader’s benefit, and this is like the extreme opposite of that approach. Everything, more or less, is left up to reader to figure out on their own.

So, there’s not a lot of what people call hand-holding or like, exposition in this book. There was a lot go over, there were a lot of details I didn’t remember so I went back to skim read as a refresher and actually I ended up just sinking into the story and doing a full re-read and enjoying myself a lot more on the second round. So, I read this way back when it was first announced and I went to film a review for this and I just could not come up with words.

A Touch of Light by Thiago Abdalla