📕 Title: Immortal Consequences
✏️ Author: I.V. Marie
📖 Genre: YA Fantasy / Academia
⭐ Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
📝 Book One of the Souls of Blackwood Academy Series

BOOK BLURB

Blackwood Academy exists in purgatory, a boarding school that prepares its students to become Reapers of lost souls. Every ten years, one student is nominated for the Decennial, a series of trials that allow the victor to choose between crossing over to the Other Side or becoming an Ascended, released from their reaping duties and granted full access to their magic. But this year things have changed; the Decennial is now a competition between six top students, and there’s only one winner.

REVIEW

Despite the six points of view it felt easy to differentiate between the characters who each have distinct personalities, goals, and well developed backgrounds. They are paired off from the start, so by chapter three all six characters had been introduced; this prevented me from feeling overwhelmed since I was already familiar with the last three when their own POV chapters came around. Inevitably, some characters were more interesting than others and I would have preferred fewer POVs, but at least all were likeable to some degree.

There are two romance subplots, academic rivals to lovers and friends to lovers, and while they are not the primary focus of the story those romantic feelings do inform character choices. I didn’t love the way they were so nearly paired up from the start, but the platonic friendship between Irene and Masika helped balance out the romance.

While the world of Blackwood Academy feels well established in some ways, some details have little impact on the story itself. For example, there are six houses, each with a different magical affinity, but there are no apparent house rivalries, affinities don’t play a big role in the story, and the houses were mentioned so rarely that I couldn’t recall them by the end of the book. Similarly, the magic felt underdeveloped; there are rules and lessons that attempt to explain but in practice it looks like vague hand waving.

Being that the students exist in this afterlife academy setting, the story unsurprisingly tackles themes of loss and grief. The students each have their own issues to work through and I loved how the Decennial trials challenge them to face their fears and secrets.

The pacing felt good,  I loved that the author doesn’t over explain, allowing readers to draw their own conclusions or puzzle things out from context provided in previous chapters. I loved the premise and the way things played out left me eager for the next installment in this series.

Thank you Random House Children’s | Delacorte Press for the advance copy of this book.