A measured review of “Priestess” by Kara Reynolds

I have mixed feelings on this book.

On one hand I haven’t read a book in its entirety since I had Covid in 2020, and have had to supplement my reading with audiobooks to get through them.

This book was getting such high praise here on r/fantasyromance but had no audiobook, that I decided to bump it to the top of my TBR for the older fmc and I’m proud to say I made it all the way through! So that in itself says the book was “good enough”

However, my kindle issue definitely had some editorial problems that made it hard to read for my foggy Covid brain, like a lack of paragraph breaks when people started speaking that made me have to re-read things a lot to digest who said what.

Outside of that, I generally enjoyed this book and am giving it a 4 as two days later I’m still thinking on it, but there are things that bother me and I think that’s likely due to this being a first book-

Spoilers below:

My favorite things about this book were the friendships that the women shared and the long yearning period between our FMC and MMC. I also appreciated the maturity of Edith and how she didn’t just run around feeling sorry for herself and making bad decisions because of it.

I did not really enjoy how the third act of the book was a bunch of loose plot lines getting tied together neatly

I know people often complain about storylines not getting tied up in stories, but I think this book could have stood a few loose ends.

It was a little too convenient to me that Edith’s ex husband happened to be the lead conquering crusader in her new country, and honestly, the whole “invasion” sort of came out of nowhere after all the waxing and waning about how strong and powerful Tintar is as a nation. I think we could have withstood never meeting Thrush.

It was also….strange? That there is mention that apparently all of Edie’s power was tied to her hagstone and not actually her own yet her goddess was communing with her and she summoned some crazy statue spirits which apparently no one else could have ever done. Doesn’t make sense to me. She’s powerful or she’s not, right?

The epilogue also really pissed me off. Maureen and Eefa make 0 sense together. I would have been much happier with little mention of Eefa in the epilogue. I feel like she was a plot device to show that Edie was capable of great forgiveness and she really didn’t need to make a comeback at the end.

It also ticked me off that the epilogue just kind of went “and 4 score and seven year later all the men died”

Like not one of these women got a happy lifelong romance? You couldn’t give me that?

And I surely did not understand the last line “I am not a religious woman”….i get that she has Alzheimer’s….but….what?? Huh?? They just said the goddess was talking to her again.

Anyway, I liked it didn’t think it was perfect, please discuss!!