[Rachel’s Review]: Kingdom of Souls by Rena Barron

Kingdom of Souls
by Rena Barron
Pages: 496
Published by HarperVoyager
Release Date: September 3rd 2019
Genres: YA, Fantasy
Source: Publisher
Format Read: ARC, eBook
Goodreads

Magic has a price—if you’re willing to pay.
Born into a family of powerful witchdoctors, Arrah yearns for magic of her own. But each year she fails to call forth her ancestral powers, while her ambitious mother watches with growing disapproval.
There’s only one thing Arrah hasn’t tried, a deadly last resort: trading years of her own life for scraps of magic. Until the Kingdom’s children begin to disappear, and Arrah is desperate to find the culprit.
She uncovers something worse. The long-imprisoned Demon King is stirring. And if he rises, his hunger for souls will bring the world to its knees… unless Arrah pays the price for the magic to stop him.

I really, really wanted to like this book. And I didn’t dislike it necessarily, I just felt like it tried to do too much in a short amount of time. Kingdom of Souls felt like three books rolled into one, and I would have liked to see the plots spaced out, especially since I am fairly certain this is supposed to be the first in a trilogy. 

Kingdom of Souls is about a girl from a family of powerful Witchdoctors who has no trace of magic at all. When children start disappearing she starts trading years of her life through blood magic to try and catch the culprit. This sounds awesome right? If the book had stuck with this plot and fleshed it out more I would have been satisfied but suddenly there’s demons and Gods and time travel and the main character is not who she seems to be and I was just overwhelmed!

For the most part I liked the characters, though the action and pacing made it hard to get close to them and connect. This is especially true when the time travel element gets introduced because for one character months have passed and for another it’s only been about two weeks and they are suddenly in love with each other? I’m definitely going to read book two in the trilogy to see if the pacing evens out but if you’re a fan of high stakes fantasy with interesting mythology this will be the book for you.