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The Marked Ones Trilogy #3
The Other Side of Truth
Sometimes the truth is more dangerous than a lie.
We all have secrets. Some we keep from others. And some we keep from ourselves. But when your life becomes nothing more than a lethal construct of secrets and lies, one false step could mean your death.
In the wake of overwhelming tragedy, Patrick, Travis, and Nualla are frantically trying to piece their lives back together. Unfortunately, there’s only so much super glue and duct tape you can paste onto something before you have to admit it might be beyond fixing. However, Travis is unwilling to just give up and accept the devastation of the family he has tried so desperately to patch together. But as he delves into the secrets of the past to uncover how his little brother became the most deadly weapon in the Kakodemoss’ arsenal, Travis begins to realize that there are some secrets better left unlearned.
A spectacular collision of unrelenting love, harrowing secrets, and heartbreaking realities. The Other Side of Truth, the final book in the Marked Ones Trilogy, rips the world of daemons wide open.
We all have secrets. Some we keep from others. And some we keep from ourselves. But when your life becomes nothing more than a lethal construct of secrets and lies, one false step could mean your death.
In the wake of overwhelming tragedy, Patrick, Travis, and Nualla are frantically trying to piece their lives back together. Unfortunately, there’s only so much super glue and duct tape you can paste onto something before you have to admit it might be beyond fixing. However, Travis is unwilling to just give up and accept the devastation of the family he has tried so desperately to patch together. But as he delves into the secrets of the past to uncover how his little brother became the most deadly weapon in the Kakodemoss’ arsenal, Travis begins to realize that there are some secrets better left unlearned.
A spectacular collision of unrelenting love, harrowing secrets, and heartbreaking realities. The Other Side of Truth, the final book in the Marked Ones Trilogy, rips the world of daemons wide open.
635 pages, Paperback
First published August 6, 2014
44 people want to read
About the author
Alicia Kat Vancil
9 books64 followers**NOTE This author profile is incorrectly named but Goodreads categorically refuses to fix this issue despite every effort made by the author and publisher. Please instead visit & follow Kat Vancil at her proper location https://www.goodreads.com/thesagaquest **
Neurodivergent storyteller Kat Vancil crafts stories about boys who kiss boys. Some take place on spacecraft racing through a sea of distant stars. Others take place in lush urban sprawls rich with the spices of a thousand far-off places that exist only in her mind. While still others take place in the halls of a coastal city high school that is and isn’t like any other in America.
Over the last 12 years she’s done work for Amazon and Writer’s Digest, had her work sold in bookstores across the English-speaking world, and won an Ippy award for excellence in independent publishing.
She currently resides in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband, their kitty studio-mate Akimi & eight overfull bookcases. And when not crafting fantastical tales of dragokin and Valkyries, Kat can usually be found frolicking in general geekiness.
Neurodivergent storyteller Kat Vancil crafts stories about boys who kiss boys. Some take place on spacecraft racing through a sea of distant stars. Others take place in lush urban sprawls rich with the spices of a thousand far-off places that exist only in her mind. While still others take place in the halls of a coastal city high school that is and isn’t like any other in America.
Over the last 12 years she’s done work for Amazon and Writer’s Digest, had her work sold in bookstores across the English-speaking world, and won an Ippy award for excellence in independent publishing.
She currently resides in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband, their kitty studio-mate Akimi & eight overfull bookcases. And when not crafting fantastical tales of dragokin and Valkyries, Kat can usually be found frolicking in general geekiness.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 8, 2014
Every book in this series has done something very poignant, different, and surprising to me. And these days I am honestly not so easily surprised. As "That" guy that more or less can predict when any piece of media is going to be, do and how it will progress and end. It's weird to have these feelings. And hell, even if I can see it all coming the piece of media might still be GOOD. Star Wars isn't bad just because it follows the heroes story so precisely you can follow along with each step.
But there's something satisfying and shiny about the feeling of these surprises. In the first book, it was terrifyingly surprising I could enjoy a book that was basically Twilight, but if real people with actual feelings acted it out. Weird magical powers, people of privilege and means, spoiled rotten by the standards of most. But they have problems, struggles, and hell. Those folk fall in love too, right? I honestly thought I'd hate the book, and I hated myself for both liking it, and for making so many assumptions about it beforehand.
The second book opens up and moves past a lot of the initial falling in love bullcrap for something even more refreshing. And that's realistic characters and the "What happens ever after?". A lot of media never really details the relationship past the "Oh yay you won me over." *The End*. But in reality that's the first tiny fraction of a relationship. Relationships are struggles, they require effort, work, and a lot of goodwill and sacrifice in cooperation with other people. I was further shamed that several of the characters I really hated in the first book, really came into focus and made me realize that my own shallow perceptions of the genre, along with the shallow and piecemeal view of them from the viewpoint of other characters was wrong. It was one of the first times in my life I went back to re-read a book because I realized that I had simply assumed a lot of things that, while usually true, aren't guaranteed. And I had screwed up the facts about a lot of characters. That's in itself is amazing, and hopefully others will take a more careful consideration despite the genre and intended audience of the series.
And finally, this book. Where I was surprised at how people grew up. This genre is often lumped with "Coming of Age" tropes and cliches. Many avoid such things because of how immature and stupid they can be. But the fact of the matter is people do grow up, and I think one of the biggest triumphs of this series is that they tackle a lot of different ways people do grow up, or don't. This book doesn't insult younger people, or teens, or adults by assuming everyone grows up the same way. Some people never grow up, and it was refreshing to see younger characters taking the burden of "Adulthood" while struggling with older characters that either never grew up or run away from the realities of their responsibilities of growing up. So many characters in this book take different paths in their lives of growing up it could almost be one of those tolerance pop-up books, but the comparison is a bit trite and insulting to this piece of media. In reality, people grow up in different ways and always will and so do the characters in this book. Some 10 year olds take care of a half dozen siblings because they took on this burden from deadbeat or just dead parents. Some people die at 80 living their whole lives avoiding any kind of responsibility or obligation forever. And this series really ends up showing off a broad spectrum, which I think will allow almost any reader to really identify with at least a couple of characters.
Lastly, I wanted to put this first, but in act of cowardice and because the subject itself makes me deeply uncomfortable, I'd like to address that this book tackles a lot of real-world topics that no book in the genres this book claims to be in would ever really tackle. The shadows of World War I, II, and modern cold-war and humans right issues is a very large focus of the conflict in this book. To a younger reader it might fly by as sci-fi craziness, but I can't imagine even an uninformed young reader won't be affected by the sheer torment and awfulness inflicted onto other human being portrayed in this book even without the context of the history of this world. Hints and some plot twists in the other books in this series came to head with even a terrorist attack climax with biological weapons (Real kids stuff huh?) in the second book, but this goes beyond that. In a world so like our own their is darkness, real truly awful and terrible things that made me wretch. Made me uncomfortable. Made me cry. But in a way these things have to be there, because that's what the real world is like to, and these ideas aren't exclusive to people without crazy magic powers. Everyone has to live in this world, and even if they don't know these things happened, or happen, they occur either way, and ignoring it all won't make them go away. In the real world, or in the one in this book. I applaud the insane courage it takes to make a world this real and show it to people, because once you read it all, the dark mirror you hold up in front of yourself about these issues will make you squirm.
TL:DR. Good book. Each one brought something interesting while building on things hinted at in the others. Don't read the last paragraph. If you're too lazy to read all of them, my last points will make you incredibly uncomfortable.
But there's something satisfying and shiny about the feeling of these surprises. In the first book, it was terrifyingly surprising I could enjoy a book that was basically Twilight, but if real people with actual feelings acted it out. Weird magical powers, people of privilege and means, spoiled rotten by the standards of most. But they have problems, struggles, and hell. Those folk fall in love too, right? I honestly thought I'd hate the book, and I hated myself for both liking it, and for making so many assumptions about it beforehand.
The second book opens up and moves past a lot of the initial falling in love bullcrap for something even more refreshing. And that's realistic characters and the "What happens ever after?". A lot of media never really details the relationship past the "Oh yay you won me over." *The End*. But in reality that's the first tiny fraction of a relationship. Relationships are struggles, they require effort, work, and a lot of goodwill and sacrifice in cooperation with other people. I was further shamed that several of the characters I really hated in the first book, really came into focus and made me realize that my own shallow perceptions of the genre, along with the shallow and piecemeal view of them from the viewpoint of other characters was wrong. It was one of the first times in my life I went back to re-read a book because I realized that I had simply assumed a lot of things that, while usually true, aren't guaranteed. And I had screwed up the facts about a lot of characters. That's in itself is amazing, and hopefully others will take a more careful consideration despite the genre and intended audience of the series.
And finally, this book. Where I was surprised at how people grew up. This genre is often lumped with "Coming of Age" tropes and cliches. Many avoid such things because of how immature and stupid they can be. But the fact of the matter is people do grow up, and I think one of the biggest triumphs of this series is that they tackle a lot of different ways people do grow up, or don't. This book doesn't insult younger people, or teens, or adults by assuming everyone grows up the same way. Some people never grow up, and it was refreshing to see younger characters taking the burden of "Adulthood" while struggling with older characters that either never grew up or run away from the realities of their responsibilities of growing up. So many characters in this book take different paths in their lives of growing up it could almost be one of those tolerance pop-up books, but the comparison is a bit trite and insulting to this piece of media. In reality, people grow up in different ways and always will and so do the characters in this book. Some 10 year olds take care of a half dozen siblings because they took on this burden from deadbeat or just dead parents. Some people die at 80 living their whole lives avoiding any kind of responsibility or obligation forever. And this series really ends up showing off a broad spectrum, which I think will allow almost any reader to really identify with at least a couple of characters.
Lastly, I wanted to put this first, but in act of cowardice and because the subject itself makes me deeply uncomfortable, I'd like to address that this book tackles a lot of real-world topics that no book in the genres this book claims to be in would ever really tackle. The shadows of World War I, II, and modern cold-war and humans right issues is a very large focus of the conflict in this book. To a younger reader it might fly by as sci-fi craziness, but I can't imagine even an uninformed young reader won't be affected by the sheer torment and awfulness inflicted onto other human being portrayed in this book even without the context of the history of this world. Hints and some plot twists in the other books in this series came to head with even a terrorist attack climax with biological weapons (Real kids stuff huh?) in the second book, but this goes beyond that. In a world so like our own their is darkness, real truly awful and terrible things that made me wretch. Made me uncomfortable. Made me cry. But in a way these things have to be there, because that's what the real world is like to, and these ideas aren't exclusive to people without crazy magic powers. Everyone has to live in this world, and even if they don't know these things happened, or happen, they occur either way, and ignoring it all won't make them go away. In the real world, or in the one in this book. I applaud the insane courage it takes to make a world this real and show it to people, because once you read it all, the dark mirror you hold up in front of yourself about these issues will make you squirm.
TL:DR. Good book. Each one brought something interesting while building on things hinted at in the others. Don't read the last paragraph. If you're too lazy to read all of them, my last points will make you incredibly uncomfortable.
September 4, 2017
of course I had to buy the next one. I could hardly put it down so I read it in a day and a half. I am not fully satisfied with the ending but now that I know there is more coming it makes sense. I cannot wait for the next one.
September 6, 2015
I binge read this series over the past few weeks and I am so sad this series has ended. I really enjoyed this series and this one is probably my favourite book of the three. This book starts dealing with the consequences of what happened at the end of book 2, the characters are all going through a hard time and it's hard to see them struggle. The problems are very real and I can understand why it took them a long time to solve things. There are a lot of revelations and hints about the guys who did the experiments and a lot of focus on is that, the plot evolves slowly and we learn more. There are also another new plot lines set up and it feels like this third book still adds a lot to the story. There's facts about the pasts and things about characters that we learn in this book. There are some very emotional scenes and a lot of love next to the sorrow as well. I really enjoy the author her writing style and how she makes use of foreshadowing and slowly moving different plot lines along. There's a lot going on, but it all fits neatly and I just wanted to keep reading as it was so well written.
I liked the ending and how things got wrapped up, but I did think the rescue attempt at the end was a bit too short, I think there was more potential in that scene. It seemed a bit too easy? I mean these are the evil guys they worked against the whole time and they never could do anything because they didn't know the address, but for how horrible it was what happened there it seemed like it got solved a bit too easily. Then there are a few plot lines that don't get tied up as neatly and some questions that remain unanswered. There was a mention of another series in this universe, so I am thinking that's probably the reason not everything get wrapped up 100%. So I am curious to see what that series will entail, as I definitely haven't had enough of this world yet. The epilogue was pretty sweet and I am happy so many characters got a happy ending.
There's a lot still to learn about the characters and with what they go through in this book, it feels like a lot of characters change or we learn new things about them. Nualla struggles with her father not being there and trying to fit into the chancellor role. Patrick struggles with what happened in the previous book and he misses Nualla, but he doesn't know how to face her after what he did. He also learns more about Aku and I liked how that part got resolved, although I did feel a bit sorry for Aku and Kira. Then Travis is struggling with letting go of this love for Nualla and instead building a relationship with Parker, but he kinda makes a lot of mistakes on the way. The story focussed more on Patrick and Travis in this book and less so on Nualla, but it really worked and I like how the multiple point of views got handled.
The love triangle basically disappears in this book and the other love interest for Travis that got hinted at in the previous books, plays a bigger part here. I did like Travis and Parker together, but I do wish there would've been a bit more scenes with them doing normal things and getting to know each other. Nevertheless it was really done well and I did like their romance. Nualla and Patrick their romance get's less attention in this book, but there was an awesome scene involving them towards the end.
In this book we learn much more about the past of some characters, the daemons and the experiments that got done. The reason behind the experiments, how it got set up and what the goal was, we also see more of what they achieved and what it really did to Patricks, Kira and Chan-rin. This book definitely adds a lot in terms of world building and I liked how with each book we learn more and know more about this world. Although there are still some questions remaining, I think the world building is done well. very interwoven into the story, with little pieces of info we get with each book.
To summarize: I really enjoyed this series and this book is probably my favourite of the three. it's very well written and the pace flows nicely. there are revelations and new info that comes to light and the multiple plot points steadily progress. There's a lot going on, but somehow the author manages to deal with all the topics without it becoming overwhelming. The ending felt a bit too easy and some questions remain, but there is hinted at another series that will be written and will take place in this universe, so I am excited about that and hope it ties up some of the lose ends. There's a lot of character change and things we learn about them and the past in this book. The love triangle get's resolved and there's a lot of focus on Travis and Parker in this book. there are also some pieces of world building added. All in all this was a great ending to the trilogy and I am so happy that there will be more stories taking place in this world.
I liked the ending and how things got wrapped up, but I did think the rescue attempt at the end was a bit too short, I think there was more potential in that scene. It seemed a bit too easy? I mean these are the evil guys they worked against the whole time and they never could do anything because they didn't know the address, but for how horrible it was what happened there it seemed like it got solved a bit too easily. Then there are a few plot lines that don't get tied up as neatly and some questions that remain unanswered. There was a mention of another series in this universe, so I am thinking that's probably the reason not everything get wrapped up 100%. So I am curious to see what that series will entail, as I definitely haven't had enough of this world yet. The epilogue was pretty sweet and I am happy so many characters got a happy ending.
There's a lot still to learn about the characters and with what they go through in this book, it feels like a lot of characters change or we learn new things about them. Nualla struggles with her father not being there and trying to fit into the chancellor role. Patrick struggles with what happened in the previous book and he misses Nualla, but he doesn't know how to face her after what he did. He also learns more about Aku and I liked how that part got resolved, although I did feel a bit sorry for Aku and Kira. Then Travis is struggling with letting go of this love for Nualla and instead building a relationship with Parker, but he kinda makes a lot of mistakes on the way. The story focussed more on Patrick and Travis in this book and less so on Nualla, but it really worked and I like how the multiple point of views got handled.
The love triangle basically disappears in this book and the other love interest for Travis that got hinted at in the previous books, plays a bigger part here. I did like Travis and Parker together, but I do wish there would've been a bit more scenes with them doing normal things and getting to know each other. Nevertheless it was really done well and I did like their romance. Nualla and Patrick their romance get's less attention in this book, but there was an awesome scene involving them towards the end.
In this book we learn much more about the past of some characters, the daemons and the experiments that got done. The reason behind the experiments, how it got set up and what the goal was, we also see more of what they achieved and what it really did to Patricks, Kira and Chan-rin. This book definitely adds a lot in terms of world building and I liked how with each book we learn more and know more about this world. Although there are still some questions remaining, I think the world building is done well. very interwoven into the story, with little pieces of info we get with each book.
To summarize: I really enjoyed this series and this book is probably my favourite of the three. it's very well written and the pace flows nicely. there are revelations and new info that comes to light and the multiple plot points steadily progress. There's a lot going on, but somehow the author manages to deal with all the topics without it becoming overwhelming. The ending felt a bit too easy and some questions remain, but there is hinted at another series that will be written and will take place in this universe, so I am excited about that and hope it ties up some of the lose ends. There's a lot of character change and things we learn about them and the past in this book. The love triangle get's resolved and there's a lot of focus on Travis and Parker in this book. there are also some pieces of world building added. All in all this was a great ending to the trilogy and I am so happy that there will be more stories taking place in this world.
June 22, 2017
The Other Side of Truth is the last of the Marked One Trilogy, a paranormal New Adult (NA) series with a complicated underlying action-thriller plot. Each book has its own particular stand-alone plot as well as the ongoing development arching throughout the trilogy. Ms. Vancil manages a remarkable balance between the main love story, the supporting love stories, the main and supporting emotional journeys, the action, and the thriller plot.
That said, one of the problems I had with the first book, turned me off in this part of the story as well. Too much drinking. Not drinking as wine with a meal, but deliberate drinking to get falling down drunk. All the characters manifest this behavior and the story presents this as a desirable action. They drink until drunk to party and have a good time, they drink until drunk at community functions as part of the celebration requirements, and they drink until drunk to deal with emotional issues. Every.single.character ... oh, I exaggerate, the 8-year old doesn’t. The glorification of this activity churned my stomach.
I do have to applaud Ms. Vancil's exceptional ability to torture her characters. RR Martin just kills them, Ms. Vancil is much meaner and lets them live. Despite Patrick and Nualla finally getting successfully married during Book 2, life continues to hold them apart. And Patrick's brother, Travis, the emotionally-wounded man scared to love anyone since they always dies falls for a warrior going into battle.
The author is saying she will be creating another series in this world. I hope when she does we see a little more of Connor and Patrick's original group of human friends. I am betting this won't happen, because, like most people, they are drifting apart after high school.
That said, one of the problems I had with the first book, turned me off in this part of the story as well. Too much drinking. Not drinking as wine with a meal, but deliberate drinking to get falling down drunk. All the characters manifest this behavior and the story presents this as a desirable action. They drink until drunk to party and have a good time, they drink until drunk at community functions as part of the celebration requirements, and they drink until drunk to deal with emotional issues. Every.single.character ... oh, I exaggerate, the 8-year old doesn’t. The glorification of this activity churned my stomach.
I do have to applaud Ms. Vancil's exceptional ability to torture her characters. RR Martin just kills them, Ms. Vancil is much meaner and lets them live. Despite Patrick and Nualla finally getting successfully married during Book 2, life continues to hold them apart. And Patrick's brother, Travis, the emotionally-wounded man scared to love anyone since they always dies falls for a warrior going into battle.
The author is saying she will be creating another series in this world. I hope when she does we see a little more of Connor and Patrick's original group of human friends. I am betting this won't happen, because, like most people, they are drifting apart after high school.
March 10, 2016
Holy crap. Swords, daemons, poison, bombs, love, family, guns, betrayal, and so, so much more.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews