Made with love
© Victoria Gryson 2025
At Shadowblade Academy, everyone fears the shadows…
Being the ordinary sister of a supernatural powerhouse isn’t fun. I live in the Crust, an outsider town for normies, while she gallivants around her top-secret academy for Abnorms.
Then everything goes sideways on my twenty-first birthday. Mediums scream at me like possessed nuns. Dudes pop out of shadows, trying to kidnap me. My dreams become very strange.
Most importantly, my sister goes missing.
I have to go looking for her, which means finding her school. Problem is, I learn the academy trains magical assassins who manipulate shadows. Badass but terrifying.
Bullies at the academy don’t think I belong. Smoldering fae, vampire, and shifter men are obsessed with me for different reasons: attraction, hate, suspicion. And who the hell is the sexy ghost-man haunting my dreams?
I’m trapped in a place where I’m always looking over my shoulder, and I can’t even trust my own shadow…
This one just didn’t click for me. It started promisingly, but I struggled to connect with the characters and their actions. I’m giving it a 2.5*
I went into a bit of a spoiler rant in my review on Goodreads, click this link if you want to read it there.
The characters missed depth and felt boring. And please don’t get me started on the nicknames…
The pacing was okay, with plenty going on, but it wasn’t impactful, it felt like it didn’t really matter in the great scheme of things.
We had minimal worldbuilding, though I can disregard that a bit as this is a sort of spin-off from / the same world as the Briarwitch Academy series.
While I, of course, know these are all issues I have with the book, other people may not have these issues and really enjoy it. And that’s all fine. But for me, I wont be continuing this series.
© Victoria Gryson 2025