Samara’s Peril
The Ilyon Chronicles #3
by Jaye L. Knight

My rating: 4 / 5
Genre: Christian fantasy

With Samara, a neighboring country, in peril, the resistance members in Landale embark on a mission to get as much information as they can. This venture will completely change the life of Jace, the half-ryrik who was an orphan, slave, and gladiator before being rescued by Rayad. Then, as war looms between Emperor Daican’s forces and Samara, news comes out of Samara of a man who performs miracles and heals the sick. Could this be the Savior that Elôm’s followers have been waiting for?

There was a lot of really good stuff in this book—action, emotion, and some major surprises. The book has 4 parts, though it mostly breaks down to 2 in my mind: the info-gathering mission and everything surrounding the battle for Samara. The first part contained a reveal that was pretty exciting, and I liked that it was both good and bad, with a hope of more good to come. However, for me, the first part was also heavily bogged down by Jace, who seems to have taken the lead as the main-main character (which I said in my review of the previous book seemed to be Kyrin, but though she does have plenty of POV scenes, this book is definitely Jace’s, overall). Because of his half-ryrik status, Jace can’t bring himself to fully accept that he has a soul and can possibly be loved by Elôm. Despite many people that he trusts giving him a lot of wise and insightful advice, he kind of just covers his ears and sinks deeper and deeper into darkness. I fully understand the purpose of this, in the frame of the grander story, but I wish it could have been done with a little less repetition and without being drawn out so much.

In the 2nd half of the book, a lot of what became an issue for me was mostly personal preference, which I’ll try to explain without spoiling anything. Once I realized in the previous book that the biblical parallel was more to Old Testament times than New, I thought about the possibility of a Messiah character, and sure enough, it’s hinted at in the synopsis for this book. But considering that any text from the “King’s Scrolls” that have been presented in these books have been taken right from the Bible, I was imagining more of a parallel to biblical history, when apparently Knight was going for more of an analogy. The Savior character in this book is vastly different from Christ in the Bible, which threw me off enough to make some scenes much less emotional for me than they might have otherwise been. On top of that, this character was such a small part of the book, he seemed to only really be there to advance Jace’s personal characterization. It was just underwhelming. My 15-year-old daughter, who first recommended this series to me, was disappointed that I was so disappointed, because she loved that aspect of the book. So clearly personal preference plays a large role here. A severely watered-down Christ character disappoints me, but it might not disappoint others. And in the end, I still liked the overall book enough to give it 4 stars. This review might make that rating seem strange, but the couple of things I mentioned weren’t as big a part as they seem; they just took a while to explain. Overall, the story was a good advancement of the world set up in the first two books. I liked King’s Scrolls more, but I’m still looking forward to seeing where the story goes from here.

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