If you are in a dark place or have personal experience with the trigger issues noted, do pause to consider how reading this content will make you feel before reading. It is about people living in an indifferent world which will pull no punches, and finding your own path.

The author has included content warnings at the beginning of the book, and I will repeat that in this review. Eleventh Cycle is rich with history and lore, and we haven’t even dissected all the details of it yet. Overall, after writing this review and spending days contemplating this book, I still don’t have a clear answer to whether I would recommend this one, on a personal level – possibly not – we were not well matched, despite the fact I adore grimdark, loved the worldbuilding and can see the potential in these pages. Perhaps because it was in the first person, but her voice, her sorrow and self-hatred were almost characters in themselves, and seeing where she had come from, and what had pushed and pulled her onto the path she found herself gave it greater impact – and to see how she chose to fight it, even passively at times. Nothing usually gets to me, but there were definite moments in the book when I would recoil at what I just read (and I mean it in the best way possible).What could have been simply a plot device, Ardalan turned into a fully fleshed out and surprisingly likable character.

There is also a list of characters and glossary of terms at the beginning of the book, which is a useful resource, although the fact that I found myself needing to pay so much attention to what was on the page, meant that I was using context more than the glossary itself to attach meanings to the different names. We have a really complex book, with several layers that give it an incredible amount of depth, from the worldbuilding of Minethria to the characters and how those characters evolve through the story, being a tour de force of grimdark fantasy, proof that we should keep an eye on the talent Kian N. The worldbuilding certainly took centre stage for me and is the one aspect that I loved about this book, particularly when it was paired with the vivid imagery that Ardalan was able to conjure.Perhaps, this was a personal thing, and I just didn’t connect enough with them, but I feel like, particularly with what these characters were enduring, there needed to be more reflection and internal experience. With Chroma we got to see a lot of his anger and confusion, with Erefiel it felt like we got to see his heart – the one that wanted to be himself, to hold out that hand to help because he could and because it was right.