Welcome back! Round two is another eARC review, kindly provided by Netgalley. This time we are going to be talking about The Rebel Healers: Chronicles of a Fractured Soul by Lany Marie. The Rebel Healers was published 7/14/2021 and is the debut novel by Lany Marie.
The tea of choice for this read was Emerald Jade Organic by David’s Tea, I am currently looking for good small business teashops if anyone has any!
The Rebel Healers follows Ellara who is a Healer who channels the world’s Goddess’s power to heal others. The Goddess powered healers have an evil counterpart in the Droc’ri who are the Dark Lord minions in the world. There is a prophecy and political machinations that are hard to follow in the first half of the novel. This being Lany’s debut novel, I found the story interesting enough to forgive the info dumping that happened at the beginning of the book. However, be warned going in you will probably be severely confused for the first 25-50% of the book. The prophecy involves a “Fractured Healer” being wed to a Sea Captain. The issue is Ellara is married to a Sea Captain at the beginning of the book and has children! And you know this when she finds out about the prophecy in the first few chapters. Sam (Husband 1) dies shortly after she finds out about the prophecy and that she is probably the healer that is referenced in it. Ellara also has kids, Margot and Kian, Margot is also a Healer in training and Kian is going to the scholars guild. Ellara is very clearing on the page in love with Sam and cares about him deeply. You can see that Lany wants you to also care about Sam and feel a portion of the pain that Ellara is feeling when he is killed. But I was sooooo confused at the start of the book, to the point of considering DNF’ing it, that I couldn’t bring myself to care. Sam was just a random person that died at the beginning of a Fantasy novel to me. And really at the beginning of the novel I didn’t care about Ellara either.
Let’s fast forward a little to the second half of the book. By the time you got to the 50% mark of the book the confusion starts to lift and you start to understand the path of the story and I at least became invest at this point. Remember this is Lany’s debut novel, so there are some learning curves. Ellara becomes someone you can cheer for and then you meet Thaddeus! Thaddeus was someone I could support from the first time Ellara meets him, which I think is what Lany wanted from Sam. You can clearly see that Ellara doesn’t want to fall for anyone else yet, because it hasn’t been long since Sam was killed. But Thaddeus, is the tragic broken Sea Captain that had got roped into working for the Droc’ri because Rokan (main Droc’ri that we follow in the book) healed him and made him a successful captain.
Overall this book was interesting and if you are will to read a Debut novel with an interesting story line but where the author has room for growth I definitely recommend this one for you. I will be picking up the sequel when it comes out because I can’t wait to see the growth in the writing but also where Thaddeus and Ellara go.
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