The Memory of Souls, Jenn Lyons – Book Review

Hello Humans! Back at it with CHUNKY fantasy books and I couldn’t be more excited. I read The Memory of Souls right at the start of September (just missed the release date but in my defense I was re-reading the other books and this is LONG) and had a wonderful time and I want to share my thoughts with you.

Potential spoilers ahead for The Ruin of Kings and The Name of All Things so if you want to go in knowing nothing about them then BACK AWAY NOW. Spoiler free for The Memory of Souls.

Goodreads Summary:

Now that Relos Var’s plans have been revealed and demons are free to rampage across the empire, the fulfillment of the ancient prophecies—and the end of the world—is closer than ever.

To buy time for humanity, Kihrin needs to convince the king of the Manol vané to perform an ancient ritual which will strip the entire race of their immortality, but it’s a ritual which certain vané will do anything to prevent. Including assassinating the messengers.

Worse, Kihrin must come to terms with the horrifying possibility that his connection to the king of demons, Vol Karoth, is growing steadily in strength.

How can he hope to save anyone when he might turn out to be the greatest threat of them all?

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First things first, because I know it’s the thing that I always care about when I’m reading the review of a sequel – do you need to reread books one and two in this series for this book to make sense? Well, in this case I think it depends. I’m coming round to the point of view that if you can reread then you probably ought to but I’m going to make a guess that if you’ve just nabbed a copy of this book you’re wanting to read it now and you don’t really want to go through the 1200+ pages that make up The Ruin of Kings and The Name of All Things. Thankfully, I think Jenn Lyons realised this and has made it so you can pretty much gather everything you need to know from the earlier chapters of this book and then march ahead into the new story. So fear not you can go straight in. If you’re like me and you basically had forgotten everything that happened in the series up to this point and you hadn’t really understood it the first time around it may be worth investing the time in rereading.

But let’s assume you’ve gone down whichever re-reading path suits you best – what is the book like? I actually think this was my favourite book in the series so far. That could obviously be as a result of reading all three of them back to back but actually I think this book has the best blend of the good aspects of book one and two. It has the intense plot with many different narrative strands that I enjoyed in book one* while also having the humour and…snark that book two had – and then some.

*I know book two has a complex narrative structure as well I just think book one had it a bit more.

I obviously can’t get to into the ins and outs of the plot because it’s book three in a trilogy so it’s a minefield of spoilers to navigate. What I will say is I think this book managed to be epic in scale while still keeping things very human. You get to see whole new swathes of this world that Jenn Lyons has built but you also see the minute human interactions that take place. Basically everyone I have spoken to about these books has been very excited about some of the romantic/shipping aspects of this particular book and I think that’s partly because that very familiar concept is a good thing to keep you interested through some of the more complicated plot happening alongside. That’s obviously in part my inability to comprehend any plot that is to do with lineage and family trees so take with a pinch of salt if you don’t have that problem.

One thing I will say is that of all the books so far this book has the highest number of dragons – so if we’re assuming that each book in this series will have more dragons than the last then I am getting VERY excited about later books. I like the way that Jenn Lyons has created these dragons and the ones that we meet in this book are just amazing – cannot wait for more.

These books are so complicated, I ought to be running and hiding, but the fact that at their core they are someone (or multiple people) trying to convey a narrative just makes them work. I’m so excited for more people to pick up these books. If this is your first time hearing about this series then I will leave you with this: do not be intimidated by their size – these are SO much fun.

My rating: 4/5 stars

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher. All opinions are my own.

The Memory of Souls is out now!

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What say you? Will you be reading this? Let me know in the comments below!

J