Title: Daughters of the Storm
Author: Kim Wilkins
Format: eBook, courtesy of NetGalley and Del Rey Books (Random House Publishing Group – Ballantine)
Start Date: February 25, 2018
End Date: March 15, 2018
Rating: 3.5 stars
“I will be your king, so it would be better for you to choose your words with care.”
He smiled. “You are a woman. You’ll be a queen.”
“I’ll be what I damn well please,” she said, with a shrug of her bony shoulders.
He snorted with laughter. “You will still be a woman. You cannot be a man.”
“Nor do I want to be a man,” she countered.
At this he shook his head in genuine bewilderment. “And so we are back to my first observation. What manner of thing are you, Bluebell?”
Daughters of the Storm is the first book of Kim Wilkins’s Blood and Gold trilogy. Here, she tells the story of five vastly different sisters that must come together to search for a powerful witch to help their ailing father. Bluebell, the oldest, is a strong warrior who wants to father in her father’s footsteps to be king (not queen) of the kingdom; Rose is married to the king of a neighboring kingdom but who has a terrible secret; Ash, the middle daughter, is discovering her aptitude for magic; the twins, Ivy and Willow, are the youngest: Ivy is vain and selfish while Willow is devout.
I’m not sure how to feel about this book. On one hand, I enjoyed the world-building and the story, not to mention the premise of a story that centered around five sisters rallying to save their father. On the other hand, I didn’t like any of the sisters (except perhaps Bluebell and possibly Ash).
But what should have been a story of female solidarity and resilience and even sisterly love felt at times to morph into a story of women and characters bemoaning their “difficult” lives. Any time something didn’t go someone’s way, it was always the same complaint of “It’s not fair” – it wasn’t fair when Wylm wasn’t able to be king, even though he was the king’s stepson and didn’t have any royal blood to speak of; it wasn’t fair when Rose wasn’t allowed to love who she wanted because she was married to a king; it wasn’t fair when Ivy wasn’t married to a king, even though she was the youngest and barely fifteen. Instead of trying to make the best of their lives and dealing with the situations they found themselves in, they decided that the best course of action was to complain. No wonder Bluebell was always frustrated with her younger sisters (and stepbrother).
I also felt cheated as the characters of the sisters were told more than shown. While this applied to each of the sisters as well as other secondary characters (for example, Wylm and his mother, Gudrun), it especially applied to Bluebell. We are told constantly that she is cruel and merciless and tough, and while we see that aspect of her character at times, that’s not all that she’s about. I hesitate to call Bluebell complex, though, because any complexity felt superficial and lacking in the depth I felt it deserved. This made it hard to connect to the characters on any meaningful level and left me ultimately unsatisfied.
However, with all that being said, I am interested in continuing the series. Although I couldn’t fully connect with all of the sisters (especially Willow and Ivy, who were literally the worst), I did end up liking most of them enough to look past their mistakes and toward their more redeeming qualities. The ending of Daughters of the Storm had several cliffhangers that I want resolved!
Also, as a side note: maybe it was just me, but I kept drawing parallels between the five sisters in Daughters of the Storm and those in Pride and Prejudice: witty Bluebell and Elizabeth; sweet Rose and Jane; educated Ash and Mary; followers Willow and Kitty; and vain Ivy and Lydia. Obviously, these parallels are not perfect – for example, Willow is a follower of a fanatical religion while Kitty is not – but they’re there (at least in my mind)…
Thank you to NetGalley and Del Rey Books for a copy of this eBook in exchange for an honest review.
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