Amy Harmon - The Bird and the Sword

Author: Amy Harmon

Title: The Bird and the Sword (The Bird and the Sword Chronicles #1)

Language: English

Format: ebook

Rating: 4 stars

Reading challenge: A book that brought tears to your eyes

No of pages: 352

Read: 25.03.2018

Goodreads

BLURB:

Swallow, daughter, pull them in, those words that sit upon your lips. Lock them deep inside your soul, hide them ‘til they’ve time to grow. Close your mouth upon the power, curse not, cure not, ‘til the hour. You won’t speak and you won’t tell, you won’t call on heaven or hell. You will learn and you will thrive. Silence, daughter. Stay alive. 

The day my mother was killed, she told my father I wouldn’t speak again, and she told him if I died, he would die too. Then she predicted the king would sell his soul and lose his son to the sky. 

My father has a claim to the throne, and he is waiting in the shadows for all of my mother’s words to come to pass. He wants desperately to be king, and I just want to be free. 

But freedom will require escape, and I’m a prisoner of my mother’s curse and my father’s greed. I can’t speak or make a sound, and I can’t wield a sword or beguile a king. In a land purged of enchantment, love might be the only magic left, and who could ever love . . . a bird? 

By now I should've learned to not take Amy Harmon's writing lightly or what? It's my fourth read by Harmon and she has managed to wow me in one or other way every time. Even my least favourite Making Faces is something that stands out from the monotone of so many other books with its stellar writing style that simply drags you into itself and keeps you there. I wouldn't say that The Bird and the Sword is now my favourite of Harmon's, but it most definitely is something that I will remember fondly (even though it managed to sneak a single tear out of me at one point). In a way it reminded me of Robin McKinley's writing, but in a way it was something else entirely. It fit my mood to the T and I honestly could not put it down before I was done.