Bitter Winter
The Ilyon Chronicles #5
by Jaye L. Knight

My rating: 3 / 5
Genre: Christian fantasy

Spoiler notice: The following review may contain some spoilers for the previous books in the series, starting with Resistance.

The resistance camp near Landale suffers great tragedy that threatens to continue until the whole camp is dismantled. Can Jace save everyone he loves?

The first 4 books in the series follow the Landale resistance fighters and those that they bring into their ranks along the way as they first must figure out a way to survive the heavy persecution of their religion and then discuss at least the possibility of going on the offensive. With two rightful kings amongst their numbers, there is talk of somehow taking back their thrones and putting and end to the tyranny that begun with Emperor Daican. But first they have to make it through the winter, and that brings the forward momentum of this series to a screeching halt. This book is akin to being an episode or two away from a series finale of a television show and having to deal with a filler episode. Maybe the episode is good in its own right, or maybe not, but you really just want to know how the over-arching plot of the season is going to resolve. That’s what we have here, and it’s just as disappointing.

A couple of disastrous events leaves the camp reeling, and the entire book is spent just trying to recover/fix what happened. I think the author made several unnecessary choices in this book, maybe to make it seem more relevant after all, or maybe to evoke more emotion. Either way, I was not nearly as engaged as I have been through most of the rest of the series, hearkening back to the tedium I felt in the first half of the first book. I’ve noted before that this particular author’s style is to have far too many POV characters, so many minor characters whose perspectives don’t really add much to the story and add instead add more of a burden to try to differentiate between a lot of different voices (which I don’t think she does all that well), and here I realized that she’s also falling into the trope that everyone must have someone. Every side character that has had a POV at some point has either found a mate or is in the process of it during this book. At least one of these characters seems to only even have a POV for the purpose of us seeing him start to have an interest in someone. I like romance, I really do…but I like it to be more subtle, and even though this isn’t a straight-out romance genre series, the romance side of things is starting to feel very unsubtle.

So I didn’t really care for this, the penultimate book in the series. It wasn’t bad, and and I am still enjoying the overall world the author has set up. But I think she could have distilled this story into a side novella or even started the next book at the end of this harsh winter and caught us up on what happened, because…well, not much did. My 16-year-old daughter continues to be a huge fan of this series, and I’m sure I’m in the minority regarding this installment in the series, but I do still recommend it to older teens through adults (it’s not YA, but it’s very clean), fans of fiction with Christian elements, whether you’re really into fantasy or not.

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