Author: Zeba Shahnaz
Genre: fantasy
Similar books: Seeker by Arwen Elys Dalton
No True Echo by Gareth P Jones
Rating:
.JPG)
Summary (provided by publisher): Seventeen-year-old Anaïs just wants tonight to end. As an outsider at the kingdom’s glittering anniversary ball, she has no desire to rub shoulders with the nation’s most eligible (and pompous) bachelors—especially not the notoriously roguish Prince Leo. But at the stroke of midnight, an explosion rips through the palace, killing everyone in its path. Including her.
The last thing Anaïs sees is fire, smoke, chaos . . . and then she wakes up in her bedroom, hours before the ball. No one else remembers the deadly attack or believes her warnings of disaster.
Not even when it happens again. And again. And again.
If she’s going to escape this nightmarish time loop, Anaïs must take control of her own fate and stop the attack before it happens. But the court's gilded surface belies a rotten core, full of restless nobles grabbing at power, discontented commoners itching for revolution, and even royals who secretly dream of taking the throne. It's up to Anaïs to untangle these knots of deadly deceptions . . . if she can survive past midnight.
My opinion: At first blush this seems like it's going to be a fairly standard fairy tale type story. After all, we have a teen girl from an outsider family pressured to make a good impression at a royal ball. These are pretty familiar elements. But Shahnaz takes a hard left turn, introducing the time loop element at the end of the first chapter. We loop over the same events over and over, each version failing for different reasons as Anais learns more about her country, her peers, the royal family, and the nature of magic. It takes a bit of patience to wade through which details are actually going to matter but it's no less interesting for that.
Advanced Reader Copy provided by NetGalley
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