The Last Namsara by Kristen Ciccarelli

Sometimes a story cuts deep to your soul. The pure raw weight of emotion in this book knocked me over. At one point I had probably 80 pages left, and a scene hit me so hard I started crying. Full on ugly-crying.

What I wasn’t expecting was that I kept getting hit by so many hard-hitting emotional moments that I would continue to intermittently cry until I finished the book. I was absolutely floored by that emotional response.

The characters are beautifully crafted. Everyone I met, including all of the supporting characters were three dimensional. They had drive, they  had desires, and they had flaws. And true flaws, real flaws. The interpersonal relationships are complicated. The slow burn romance that had me screaming at my book, developed organically. The family relationships, beautiful in the fact that they are so obviously reflect a real family.

The lies, the meticulously crafted lies. Some I could see coming, but others, others left me reeling. Ciccarelli is a true story-teller. She excels at her craft. Woven into the story, are small breaks from reality, in the form of a story told to further expand our knowledge of this world of dragons and legends. I fell in love with those small snippets of folklore.

Cicarelli plants seeds of information as carefully as a botanist in her garden. I feel as if I need to reread the book just to fully see what had been going on the whole time. That was the only drawback that I had seen was how slow Asha had been at picking up hints that I could see coming. However, now in hindsight, it wasn’t until the end of the book when I realized how easily I’d been played.

The Last Namsara should be one of your first picks to read in 2018. The tale is spun with intricate craft, exposing the true reality of humanity, all the while surrounded by old magic and dragons. The dangerously addictive characters are entirely too easy to fall in love with. And once you’ve read the last page, you’ll remember the reason you fell in love with stories to begin with.

You can get The Last Namsara here through Bookshop.org, which supports local independent bookstores!

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