Keeper of the Scarlet Petals

Book: Keeper of the Scarlet Petals

Author: A.N. Skye

Series: Keeper of the Scarlet Petals 

Rating: 3/5

Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. There are a lot of different things I’d like to talk about in regards to it, but we’ll start with a spoiler free overview. :) 

To start, I’ll go over the things I liked. I really liked Jasmine. I thought she was an interesting and strong character. She could probably use a little more development, but I think there is time for that in the future books. Which I fully intend on reading! I feel like we could have used some more information about her story than just her being from the slums, it felt sort of like a placeholder while the author tried to figure out what exactly she wanted for Jasmine’s background, but not horrible. I think one of the big things I wanted to hear about was her parents, but alas. 

The love interest was a solid character, and I think that he and Jasmine are pretty well suited for each other. I also really liked Jasmine’s best friend, Lydia, she was a super fun energy to the book and her sort of love interest was a fun view of some minor character development.

I think the plot was interesting and kept me intrigued and entertained, and I think the plot twists were pretty cool. I also feel like the attacks were random enough that I wasn’t constantly analyzing when I thought the next one would be. It was an easy and fun read, and something I could read again without feeling bored. Even though I know everything that happens I think there’s enough mystery to keep me reading into everything to find something new each time- or at least a couple times. This was truly a solid book for what appears to be a debut novel from the author. 

Now, onto a spoiler filled review.

***** Spoilers Ahead *****

Alright, now I’ll go ahead and get a little bit more in depth about my likes and dislikes with this book, but we’ll start with the characters themselves.

Jasmine: I liked her a lot, but I feel like I need more of her background to understand her motivations. I feel like I did not understand why she did a lot of the stuff she did, and it was said she was making progress with her trainer- I think his name was Ryker- but then she would still make weird choices after that felt too immature. This was also one of the first books I’ve read where the main character just fully goes for it and like kisses/initiates romance with the love interest as soon as they realize they are interested. That is not necessarily a bad thing, just with them being some sort of enemies to lovers-esque relationship it was kind of whiplash. I do think they were cute together though. 

Asher: I loooooved the twist with him going from keeper to kept (fun play on words, yeah?), I think it was done in a pretty cool way. I had noticed the noble’s name wasn’t given in the description and I had thought it a little weird at first but it totally makes sense now. Asher was a pretty cool character, I liked him a lot, and it sucked that his whole family had to die for this story but alas. I also questioned some of Asher’s motivations, but I think the parts from his point of view were still very interesting.

I liked the side characters, Pina and Lydia were both fun characters. Esmerelda felt a little odd, but after the twist at the end it makes sense why she didn’t feel fully developed. I think the way the school was portrayed was interesting, but it felt very isolated from the rest of the kingdom. I’m not sure if I liked that, because I also just felt kind of disconnected from caring about things like who Pina’s family is and the politics of it all because it felt like there weren’t any true consequences. 

One thing I did have a pretty big issue with was the POV. The book was written in third person, which is not my favorite but I don’t hold a grudge against it. What I had the issue with was that the author seemed to not be able to decide between writing in third person and first person. The character would have her little thoughts in italics and some pages were half italics. Not everything the main character thinks has to be switched to first person, it is possible to convey thoughts in third person. I honestly don’t know why this bothered me so much, maybe because of how much of a switch up it was going between the third person and first person. I’m not entirely sure, but I know that it was very obvious to me throughout the whole book. 

There were also a few inconsistencies with things like how many people were attacking at one time or saying "he" instead of "the" that kind of jumped out at me, but nothing too horrible or that would make me not read the book.

Again, I did really enjoy the story in this book and I do plan on continuing to read this series!