Everyone knows magic isn’t real. Alien invaders? Ha! Yet, unless one skeptic changes her mind, Earth and her life will meet a swift end.
Disillusioned with her military career, Red Hernandez crawled back to civilian life as a second tier security lead for an engineering marvel meant to cram more people into the tiny island of Manhattan. She expected her biggest struggles to be integrating back into a society where social media and closet space reigned supreme. But when mysterious forces destroy a building similar to the one she’s chartered to protect, in an implosive blast never before seen, all notions of a cushy retirement job go up in smoke.
With lives on the line, but big money pushing to continue construction, Red finds the steely determination that she believed lost in the desert of her past. She unravels the mystery of the destructive tech, discovering it to be not just alien, but magical, and re-evaluates everything she believed to be true.
Can one woman stop magic-wielding invaders from destroying the world, or will disbelief be her undoing?
The Guardian of the Palace by Steven J Morris was a thrilling blend of fairy tale creatures, pop culture references, and bad a military characters who scare the crap out of me, AND I LOVED IT!
4.5/5 stars
We are introduced to Red who is no longer is special services, and is now working a security at a massive housing for a few dozen billion dollar companies. Things take a twist when a building very similar to the Palace is taken down in a way they can’t seem to understand.
Let’s start with the plot of this book. It’s a very promising start to a new 4-5 book series that leaves you hanging off the edge of your seating wanting the next book immediately. I’m not there yet, but that ending has me shook! Back to the plot. It was very fast paced and very easy to plow through the entire book. We are taken back a few years to understand how our unlikely crew came to be. I loved the multi-perspectives and the fact that we started on a day where the action is immediate and showed us how we came to our current timeline.
The characters were all so well thought out and so likeable, you can’t help but cheer them on the entire time. Red was quite the main character, a spitfire who is an icon as far as I’m concerned. Their background stories are so heartbreaking you feel for them so easily and so clearly.
The action in this book was extremely well written and easy to follow! Action packed fantasy is exactly what I need from the world. Anytime I can get a book like this, I can’t stop singing praises of it!
Back to the ending. Loved it. Can’t imagine a better setup for the next book. I loved Stevens writing style and all of the pop culture references. As a Marvel nerd, this was heaven!
