A man with an unknown past
For years, Amar has traveled the Kavoran empire, seeking a way to recover his lost memories and end the curse that plagues him. With support from loyal friends, Amar may finally be on the verge of finding answers, but to do so, he’ll need to enlist the help of an unexpected guide.
A girl afraid of her own powers
Kesari is a Tarja, granted magical abilities through her Bond with a spirit named Lucian. Haunted by past mistakes that have left her desperate to sever her Bond, Kesari has her own reasons for agreeing to help Amar. But in doing so, she may finally have to face the fears she’s carried ever since leaving home.
A woman on a vital mission
Meanwhile, a young refugee named Aleida is in hot pursuit, hoping the secret behind Amar’s curse can save her brother from a fatal illness. With so much at stake and little left to lose, Aleida will stop at nothing to get what she wants.
And when their paths collide, all three are set on a journey to unravel a mystery far deeper than they ever suspected.
Kop
Tethered Spirits is a book with a pretty interesting premise. I liked how it stuck to it throughout, while still developing the world and plot enough to allow for a more expansive series later on. I thought another thing it did really well was showing how different cultures within the book’s world interact (in good and bad ways). Really, I liked how the world actually has different cultures with different beliefs and traditions. We visit many places in the story, so it’s nice that they each have their own feel. There were also parts of the book that really kept me wanting to read, such as when the group meets an infamous Tarja near the beginning who might be able to get answers for Amar. I thought their interactions with each other were portrayed really well here.
I found the prose overall to be alright. It didn’t strike me as particularly great, but there wasn’t anything overtly bad about it either. There were a few awkward metaphors that, to me, felt shoehorned in. I felt the same about the characters as a whole. They were okay. There was nothing bad about them, but they just never felt fully realized. They seemed to mainly exist for the scene they were in and nothing else. This is more about the prose, but there were some scenes where I didn’t realize other characters were present until they were suddenly brought up in the middle of it. Out of the three POVs, Aleida’s felt the weakest and most repetitive. Two of her scenes feel pretty much like direct copies of each other. I also felt that she had the least character development, whereas Amar and Kesari were given lots of growth.
My one major complaint is how the book would frequently withhold information about a character while we were reading from that character’s POV. The whole, “They couldn’t let anyone know about their terrible secret” sort of writing. I found it incredibly aggravating because it took me right out of the story. Why are we allowed access to all of their other thoughts but not this one? Personally, it doesn’t make me want to know more, and when the secret finally is revealed, it’s usually always anticlimactic. And that was the case here.
Overall, I thought the book was just okay. Yes, it did some things that annoyed me. However, I didn’t find anything bad about it. It was just alright.
5/10
Hiu
The beauty of these SPFBO group reviews is that sometimes you read your co-blogger’s thoughts and think “oh they’ve touched on a lot of the stuff I wanted to say!”. The ugly bit is when you read their thoughts and think “…oh no, we disagree.”
Here, it’s a bit of both. I agree with a bunch of what Kop says (Aleida’s POV definitely didn’t feel as well-realised as the others, to me), but I think I have a higher opinion of this book as a whole.
Tethered Spirits, in my opinion, is fundamentally solid. There’s a bunch of stuff in here that I would say is skillfully done. For example, I loved the way the POV chapters were chained together. Too often, multi-POV books have that feeling of “aw no, another POV swap” just when you’re getting into the groove of a particular character. Here, though, I thought that the swapping of perspectives was very naturally handled, and in a lot of cases strengthened how certain character relationships were portrayed. You get that nice feeling of progression with Amar and Kesari travelling together, and then some bonus, foreboding tension when it cuts to Aleida chasing the main group.
There are a lot of good ideas in here too, and I feel like T.A. Hernandez does some quite clever things with them. I loved the whole concept of tarja spirits – dead sorcerers who experience a second life by taking on an abstract form and bonding with another human to give them magical powers. So… I guess they’re sort of halfway between a familiar and a Pokémon? But sentient.
I appreciated too that a good deal of thought had clearly been put into each of the characters. They all have clear motives, even those without their own POV, and you can tell that these motives drive their actions (and therefore the plot). They all have their own vulnerabilities too, which again affect the wider story.
To boil down my thoughts on Tethered Spirits… I feel like there isn’t a lot I can complain about on the macro level. Again, I think this book is fundamentally solid. Characters, plot, setting… none of them feel divorced from the other, and they all inform each other — which is always something I look for. On the micro level, though… I do have a few criticisms, and this is where I start to agree with Kop a little more.
Considering things scene-by-scene , I often felt like the challenges faced by the characters felt a little too easily-surmounted, and that the dialogue felt a little too simplistic, to the point where the book felt a little young to me in some spots. The “next thing to do” would often conveniently be revealed to the characters after the “current thing to do” had been completed, and so there was never any real sense of struggle.
To be fair, the characters do have battles to fight with their hurts and vulnerabilities in an introspective sense, but I felt like there could have been a bit more variation in terms of speedbumps and obstacles in the overarching plot. The pursuit by Aleida and her tarja spirit is kind of the only main danger the group faces throughout the book (although I did like how that grew in complexity), and in an epic fantasy novel I kind of expect more than that? I guess I felt like Aleida needed a Padan Fain to her Shai’tan, or a Joffrey to her White Walker, if that makes sense to anyone.
For me though, I guess the biggest thing missing from this book was something a bit more intangible. It felt like it needed more of an original voice to it, throughout the whole thing. Both description and dialogue. Like Kop, I thought the prose was just… alright. Which is a shame, because I genuinely feel that with a bit more of a defined personality to the writing, I’d be giving this a very high score.
So yeah. To sum up my thoughts on Tethered Spirits… I thought it was a story with good bones to it, I appreciated the thought that went into crafting the characters, and I loved some of the late-game twists… But I just really wish it had a bit more colour and charisma to it.
My score is a 7/10.
The Fantasy Inn’s final score for Tethered Spirits is:
6/10
