Review – The Soul of Power (The Waking Land, Book 3) by Callie Bates (3/5 stars)

Reading Level: Young Adult
Genre: Fantasy
Length: 480 pages
Publisher: Del Rey
Release Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN-13: 978-0399177446
Stand Alone or Series: 3rd book in the Waking Land series
Source: eGalley from NetGalley
Rating: 3/5 stars

“Sophy Dunbarron—the illegitimate daughter of a king who never was—has always felt like an impostor. Separated from her birth mother, raised by parents mourning the loss of their true daughter, and unacknowledged by her father, Sophy desires only a place and a family to call her own. But fate has other ideas. Caught up in Elanna Valtai’s revolution, Sophy has become the reigning monarch of a once-divided country—a role she has been groomed her whole life to fill.

But as she quickly discovers, wearing a crown is quite a different thing from keeping a crown. With an influx of magic-bearing refugees pouring across the border, resources already thinned by war are stretched to the breaking point. Half the nobility in her court want her deposed, and the other half question her every decision. And every third person seems to be spontaneously manifesting magical powers.

When Elanna is captured and taken to Paladis, Sophy’s last ally seems to have vanished. Now it is up to her alone to navigate a political maze that becomes more complex and thorny by the day. And worse, Sophy is hiding a huge secret—one that could destroy her tenuous hold on the crown forever.”

This is the third and final book in the Waking Land series. This was by far my least favorite book in this series. I really didn’t enjoy Sophy as a character and liked the politics she was enmeshed in even less. Things got better about 70-80% of the way into the book, but I still didn’t enjoy it all that much.

I never like reading books that are solely about politics and that is what this one was. I also felt like Sophy didn’t treat the characters that were trying to help and support her very well; I just didn’t like her character much. To be fair she pretty much never gets a break and is constantly having people criticize and pick at her; it was an uncomfortable and depressing read for me.

Elanna and Jance joined late in the story and this improved things some. The series wrap up decently and it ended okay.

This book took a long time to read and I almost stopped reading it a couple times. I pushed ahead because it’s the final book in the series. I kind of wish I hadn’t read it at all…although it does tie up things at the end.

Overall this was my least favorite book in the series. I didn’t enjoy Sophy or the situation she was in and found the whole read to be slow and depressing. It does tie up the story though which was nice.