Poison Study by Maria V. Snyder

Rating ★★★★★

A Brief Summary: About to be executed for murder, Yelena is offered an extraordinary reprieve. She'll eat the best meals, have rooms in the palace—and risk assassination by anyone trying to kill the Commander of Ixia.And so Yelena chooses to become a food taster. But the chief of security, leaving nothing to chance, deliberately feeds her Butterfly's Dust—and only by appearing for her daily antidote will she delay an agonizing death from the poison.As Yelena tries to escape her new dilemma, disasters keep mounting. Rebels plot to seize Ixia and Yelena develops magical powers she can't control. Her life is threatened again and choices must be made. But this time the outcomes aren't so clear...

Favorite Quote: “An execution order hasn’t kept us apart before. There are ways to get around it. We will be together.”

“Is that an order?”

“No, a promise.” 

Why You Should Read It: I could spend days going on and on about why you should pick up this series and read it, but I will start with only one; to experience the wonder that is Valek. He’s sultry, he’s sneaky, he’s conniving and demanding and he’s pretty much the love of my life. Sure, there have been other YA stories where I’ve fallen in love with one of the characters but Maria V. Snyder writes her characters in such a way that you don’t realize how much you care for them until it’s 3 in the morning and you’ve powered through an entire book just to see what happens. Even the way she wrote Valek was like an assassin. She snuck him in, sprinkled him with some apprehension and a bit of a sharp wit. He’s as addictive as Criollo.

Don’t even get me started on Ari and Janco… This was my second read-through of this book and I was absolutely disgusted with myself when I rediscovered the Power Twins because I had forgotten about them in the first place! But I’ll save the gushing about them for another time, now I must move onto the story.

Snyder lays a map of Ixia in front of our eyes from the beginning, trapping you in her world. She moves effortlessly between paragraphs, months passing from sentence to sentence. That’s one of the things I like most about her writing; it doesn’t drag on and on with the unimportant details of the love interests eye color and smell. She mentions his blue eyes and his smell and you remember it because she’s just that dang good. I felt as if I was swept away in Yelena’s adventure because of the quick passage of time instead of festering in angst like in other YA novels.

This is just the first book and it’s full of twists and turns and surprises that you’ll never guess… Even if you’re reading it a second time. I can’t wait to pick up Magic Study again and power through it with the intensity I felt with Poison Study. Hey, it’s a long weekend because of the holiday. Who says I can’t finish the entire series? I’d bet a month’s wages! (RIP Rand :’( )