A very refreshing young adult novel with an atypical female lead. Katsa is a Graceling, a person born with a special enhanced ability (not a super power persay, as they are more mundane abilities; referred to as a Grace), and evident by having eyes of two different colors. Katsa's Grace is for fighting and her uncle the King uses her as his enforcer. Katsa is a smart woman, can easily beat or kill anyone who comes against her and desires none of the trappings or roles for the women of her country. She can take care of herself, and frequently is the one doing the rescuing. This a good book for young girls, and a good alternative for a genre which can be filled with princesses needing rescuing or focused on marriage. ( )

1. That scene in Randa’s throne room when the king’s like “I’ll kill you” and Katsa goes “mm no” and he’s all “

Possibly the WORST AUDIO BOOK I'VE EVER LISTENED TO. I loathe "full-cast" audio. Ugh. Gross gross gross. I was so disgusted by the terrible voice actors that I almost ripped the CD from my car stereo and threw it into traffic.

I will have to read it by eye.

In a world where there were not so many somewhat more original, somewhat better constructed, and somewhat more well paced books featuring young women with special powers and difficult relatives, I would have rated this somewhat more highly. Graceling Katsa, an exemplary fighter from childhood with speed, endurance, accuracy is used as a enforcer by her uncle the King but has her own agenda. After meeting Po a graceling with different but similarly effective talents she realizes that she can and must claim her own freedom. ( )

Representation: N/A?
Trigger warnings: Death of a character in the past, blood depiction, near-death experience, animal death, hypothermia, blood depiction, physical injury
Score: Six points out of ten.
This review can also be found on The StoryGraph.

I recently added this book to my list and I had high expectations for this considering I've never read from this author before and this is a start of a series but unfortunately I have two statements to make, one I was underwhelmed by this and probably won't continue with the series and two, oh wait the library I got this from only has the first book and won't get the sequels since they got their last batch this year. Where do I even begin? It starts with the main character Katsa or Kat for short and she lives in one of the seven kingdoms of this world; that's where the first problems with this book emerge. First off is the worldbuilding, it's just not there, there's no explanation for how the kingdoms were formed or the Grace system, I can't wrap my head around it. Second off is the characters, they weren't that fleshed out and the only thing that made Katsa special is that she can kill people with her bare hands and she has different coloured eyes, the other people were meh and the pacing is slow to say the least. Now with that out of the way Katsa initially lives by herself until she meets this person called Prince Po who is a sovereign of a kingdom whose name I forgot and that is why readers consider this a "romantasy", a fantasy romance like Fourth Wing however I wasn't a fan of this one. Most of the book revolves around Katsa's new relationship with Po and there were some events that garnered some interest like that horse scene and meeting new people like Leck who dies later and Bitterblue, I struggled to find a connection with them even when Bitterblue got better at fighting with Katsa's help. That's essentially it. What a shame. ( )