Broken Souls and Bones by L.J. Andrews

TL;DR: Definitely not for me. Dull and a bit predictable.
Source: NetGalley, so many thanks to the publisher!

Plot: Girl gets kidnapped, falls in love with the ‘enemy’ and has great, awesome power.
Characters: Fairly run of the mill, though our MMC was mute, so that was a nice mix-up.
Setting: Ehhh, it was clearly not important so didn’t get a ton of page time that I can clearly recall.
Romantasy: The romance was fairly insta-lust/love. The fantasy was… well it was in a fantasy world.

Summary:

Lyra Bien intended to live a quiet life to avoid the attention of the magic-obsessed king in the fortress of Stonegate. Until Roark Ashwood—the prince’s silent guard and rumored killer for the crown—invades her village and uncovers the truth behind the silver scars in her eyes. To save her best friend from death, she’s forced to reveal her abilities, and is immediately claimed by the crown as the next melder.

To be the King’s melder is to be revered and feared in equal measures, but above all it is a slow death sentence. Lyra is determined to find a way to free herself and her friends from bondage. But first she must get more information from the silent, brooding sentry who first took her captive: Roark.

As Lyra gets closer to Roark, she soon learns he’s nothing like she assumed—and in fact everything she needs. The more they work as allies, the harder it becomes to ignore the growing passion between them. After a sinister truth is revealed, Roark and Lyra must choose to stand against all they know, or accept their dark destiny.

Thoughts:

I wonder, what it is with romantasy authors and readers and silver body parts? Primarily it’s silver hair, here we have silver eyes. If you want a close second we sometimes get the purple eyes. But it’s the silver (or close second, white) that puzzles me. In Broken Souls and Bones we have a girl with ‘silver scars in her eyes’ from a super secret, special magic she can use.

Throughout the course of this novel we see her kidnapped by the enemy, become an expert at her never used magic, and then fall in love with said enemy. It is exceptionally standard for it’s genre. I will have to unfortunately call out the fantasy elements of this. I don’t know that I’ve seen a magic system quite so half-baked in quite a while. I’ve seen several videos and reviews of people attempting to explain it and nearly everyone agrees – it doesn’t really make sense. There are four types of magic users, two of them effectively do the same things, one dose some slightly similar but different things and the last one is super special! Want to guess who has that power? Consequently we primarily just hear about the others, instead we get a focus on this forbidden and ‘special’ power, the war people fight over it, and Lyra gets forced to use hers for a big ole mean King.

So we have her special power she learns quickly and then also quickly falls in love with her ‘enemy’. The book is fairly slow in other places, the pacing is not consistent in the least, but as noted my primary issue was the magic system. So this wasn’t my favorite. It was quick and unsurprising. Do I recommend it? Not really? But if you’re into this type of familiar romantasy, maybe!