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Dagger Eyes
Princess Alanitora of Trenvern holds the uncanny ability to read people. From being able to tell if someone is lying to sensing their true intentions, her trust is hard to gain. So when an unexpected turn of events forces her to leave her home and the people behind, those skills— along with her extensive abilities in combat— may be the only thing to protect her. Alanitora’s life drives further into turmoil each turn. With the fate of her kingdom on her shoulders, the princess can no longer fight her battle alone. But what at first seems like tragedy might be a conspiracy long in the making that will undo all she thought she knew. A collection of allies, a cadre of assassins, an entire kingdom. All eyes are on her.
The first in a trilogy, Dagger Eyes is an action-packed adventure novel with elements of both mystery and romance that will keep readers on their toes while exploring a number of unique themes.
The first in a trilogy, Dagger Eyes is an action-packed adventure novel with elements of both mystery and romance that will keep readers on their toes while exploring a number of unique themes.
426 pages, Hardcover
Published March 25, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
May 30, 2022
Dagger Eyes is a soft fantasy (light on the magic) court intrigue book that was submitted to me to review. It is also, unfortunately, a book I struggled to finish, primarily due to the plot, but somewhat to the characters as well.
The plot is slow, which is less the issue than it is slow and filled with fluff and injected with the occasional hollow action sequence. The actual core scenes that progress the story are few and far in-between; there is a mysterious organization trying to kill our Protagonist, but the only interaction with them is when they try to kill her every couple hundred pages. We don't interact them, our MC isn't narratively compelled to figure out who they are, isn't locked into an environment where she knows her hunters are present and has to try and navigate through or around them to fulfill the more immediate plot, etc etc. This results in this plot being largely regulated to the background and reduces the story to a travel narrative spiced solely by the adventure of the moment. We get more plot elements as the story progresses, but the author keeps the details from us, telling us only (and repeatedly) 'something dangerous is afoot that neither you nor the MC knows about.' But again, that doesn't give us anything to work with/enjoy. The author uses action scenes to inject excitement into the travels, but they are ultimately hollow because they often don't involve the major plot, or concrete stakes/objectives besides 'survive', and without complications to make them interesting. (They just involve characters fighting in various environments, no additional challenges.)
Aside from the plot, I struggled to like/invest in the characters. Owen (our second pov character) is particularly rough in this regard; he's largely useless, verges on incompetence (unable to ride a horse despite being a trained solider), is bereft autonomy/ self-agency, and exists almost exclusively to pine after our MC (Alanitora.) He is actively difficult to like because of all these things; he has no scenes of competence where he performs competently, or shows heroic qualities, and spends most of the book following orders and being derided (particularly in the later half.) This results in a character that's hard to root for.
Alanitora is better from a likability standpoint due to her physical competence and more involved morality and thought processes, but is contradictory in her description vs her execution. In the book, Alanitora is described as calculating, analytical, and cold (paraphrasing slightly here) and is often viewed as emotionless because of this. The problem is she doesn't behave like this; she constantly makes rash decisions based on emotions, constantly is surprised/lacks control of her situation, makes out with a prince she's known for days despite being engaged to a different foreign prince, and despite being an 'intellectual' character her first ( and largely only) response to conflict is violence (some of this is due to the guards in the narrative having all gone to the 'stand around and let the protagonists fight the enemies 1v1' school of combat, enemies and allies both.) Her being combat competent isn't a problem, but it being the only way she resolves conflict renders the core of her character irrelevant. The plot is also at fault here because one of core elements of Alanitora's cerebral side is that she possesses the ability to see a person's nature by looking into their eyes (I.E trustworthy of not.) But she barely uses this ability, and never to any real effect; she is caught out by enemies twice in the course of the narrative, and finds a couple trustworthy people whom she only decides to trust after they prove their worth on several different occasions (rendering her true sight in this regard pointless.) Her entire character (both the analytical side, true sight, and the competent fighter —although her being competent in both without exaggerating her emotional incompetence is part of what makes Owen useless as a secondary protagonist—) is designed for a contained narrative of intrigue (especially for situations where her true sight bestowed knowledge that she couldn't openly act upon) but is instead situated in a travel/adventure narrative without a clear/pressing deadline.
The secondary characters around Alanitora are better executed, having clear personalities they fulfill, roles in the story, and relationships with one another. (Their relationships with Alanitora are flawed because they don't fulfill/further the narrative of her being cold and analytical. Her two maids have actively amicable relationships with her.)
The prose is solid, but does occasionally shoe-horn-in fancy word where it doesn't quite fit, and the use of more modern colloquialisms and turns of phase can be jarring.
The plot is slow, which is less the issue than it is slow and filled with fluff and injected with the occasional hollow action sequence. The actual core scenes that progress the story are few and far in-between; there is a mysterious organization trying to kill our Protagonist, but the only interaction with them is when they try to kill her every couple hundred pages. We don't interact them, our MC isn't narratively compelled to figure out who they are, isn't locked into an environment where she knows her hunters are present and has to try and navigate through or around them to fulfill the more immediate plot, etc etc. This results in this plot being largely regulated to the background and reduces the story to a travel narrative spiced solely by the adventure of the moment. We get more plot elements as the story progresses, but the author keeps the details from us, telling us only (and repeatedly) 'something dangerous is afoot that neither you nor the MC knows about.' But again, that doesn't give us anything to work with/enjoy. The author uses action scenes to inject excitement into the travels, but they are ultimately hollow because they often don't involve the major plot, or concrete stakes/objectives besides 'survive', and without complications to make them interesting. (They just involve characters fighting in various environments, no additional challenges.)
Aside from the plot, I struggled to like/invest in the characters. Owen (our second pov character) is particularly rough in this regard; he's largely useless, verges on incompetence (unable to ride a horse despite being a trained solider), is bereft autonomy/ self-agency, and exists almost exclusively to pine after our MC (Alanitora.) He is actively difficult to like because of all these things; he has no scenes of competence where he performs competently, or shows heroic qualities, and spends most of the book following orders and being derided (particularly in the later half.) This results in a character that's hard to root for.
Alanitora is better from a likability standpoint due to her physical competence and more involved morality and thought processes, but is contradictory in her description vs her execution. In the book, Alanitora is described as calculating, analytical, and cold (paraphrasing slightly here) and is often viewed as emotionless because of this. The problem is she doesn't behave like this; she constantly makes rash decisions based on emotions, constantly is surprised/lacks control of her situation, makes out with a prince she's known for days despite being engaged to a different foreign prince, and despite being an 'intellectual' character her first ( and largely only) response to conflict is violence (some of this is due to the guards in the narrative having all gone to the 'stand around and let the protagonists fight the enemies 1v1' school of combat, enemies and allies both.) Her being combat competent isn't a problem, but it being the only way she resolves conflict renders the core of her character irrelevant. The plot is also at fault here because one of core elements of Alanitora's cerebral side is that she possesses the ability to see a person's nature by looking into their eyes (I.E trustworthy of not.) But she barely uses this ability, and never to any real effect; she is caught out by enemies twice in the course of the narrative, and finds a couple trustworthy people whom she only decides to trust after they prove their worth on several different occasions (rendering her true sight in this regard pointless.) Her entire character (both the analytical side, true sight, and the competent fighter —although her being competent in both without exaggerating her emotional incompetence is part of what makes Owen useless as a secondary protagonist—) is designed for a contained narrative of intrigue (especially for situations where her true sight bestowed knowledge that she couldn't openly act upon) but is instead situated in a travel/adventure narrative without a clear/pressing deadline.
The secondary characters around Alanitora are better executed, having clear personalities they fulfill, roles in the story, and relationships with one another. (Their relationships with Alanitora are flawed because they don't fulfill/further the narrative of her being cold and analytical. Her two maids have actively amicable relationships with her.)
The prose is solid, but does occasionally shoe-horn-in fancy word where it doesn't quite fit, and the use of more modern colloquialisms and turns of phase can be jarring.
March 11, 2022
For a debut novel it is absolutely amazing! The characters, the story, the plot twists! I’m an avid reader, and I absolutely fell in love with the Characters. There’s a character for anyone to attach themselves to, there’s representation galore and the plot twists?! My god, I absolutely was floored at least once by a surprise! I pride myself on seeing plots unfold well before they do and while I saw several plot strings and called two plot devices, being surprised while also having it make perfect sense with the writing is rare for me and I loved it.
I couldn’t say enough about this book, I know it hasn’t officially debuted, but I preordered a signed copy and I am already excited and waiting for the rest of this trilogy.
All in all, if you’re into fantasy, adventure, political intrigue and just young people being young and figuring themselves out, this is a book for you.
I couldn’t say enough about this book, I know it hasn’t officially debuted, but I preordered a signed copy and I am already excited and waiting for the rest of this trilogy.
All in all, if you’re into fantasy, adventure, political intrigue and just young people being young and figuring themselves out, this is a book for you.
February 3, 2024
I have a lot of thoughts about this book and none of them are positive. This was a slog to get through and toward the end I found myself just counting down the pages until I could shut the book for good.
The writing is okay. There's a lot of words that are not used correctly and it feels like the author just thought they sounded good. The book also has a lot of grammatical and editorial mistakes, which we are warned about in the beginning. Still it was a lot worse than I thought it was going to be and I feel like it could be easily fixed with a quick beta read.
The pacing is really weird. I was probably halfway through the book when one of the characters mentions that is hasn't even been a full week since the beginning of the story. If the map for this book is accurate, they travel over 200 miles on horseback in a few days and they constantly camp or stay at places during this time. This pacing also comes into play when you get characters telling other characters that they have changed so much over the course of the book, but again it's been a week. How much can you change in that span of time especially when not that much happens.
I wrote down some of my thoughts as I read the book.
The attempted assault of Alanitora by her own guard was...idk what to say about that. I think it was just a device used to show how she doesn't take shit from anyone, but I feel like it could've been done differently. This also happened maybe three chapters in and it just came out of left field for me.
The beginning is really weird when the king tells his daughter that she's going to be married to the prince of another kingdom. She immediately wonders how the succession is going to work and I wondered it too. His reply was that he's going to keep ruling for a long time and that's it. He doesn't actually answer her question as to what happens when he dies and his only heir is the queen of a different kingdom. We find out what was really going on here at the end of the book, but she only questions it once and never again.
She gets poisoned and none of her entourage knows about it?? Owen and Diane fight off a huge group of guards and have to carry the princess back to her carriage but none of the soldiers with them see this? What? Only one other soldier knows about it and it's because Owen told him.
Alanitora being described as super smart while constantly making the stupidest mistakes is so annoying.
She can read people, but this power rarely works. There's a part later on in the book where she makes a note of how her powers haven't been working like they should and she wonders if she can only read people from her own kingdom, but even when she was in her own kingdom she was horrible at reading people. She is constantly looking people right in the eye and seeing nothing wrong, only for something bad to go down a page later. There's maybe two or three characters who can block her powers and she's never suspicious that they can do this.
It is established pretty early that the soldiers guarding her are all bumbling fools and I don't understand why. These are trained soldiers from her kingdom and yet they act like they work for the circus. She also gets annoyed with the way they run things all the time and I don't know why she doesn't just order them to do what she wants since she is the princess and she is in charge of all of them.
There's this part where she gathers all her friends in her tent and says that everybody needs to clear the air and say what they know. Diane has stuff to say, but she cuts her off and doesn't let her say it. Then there's two other times where Diane approaches her because she wants to ask her something and she just tells her she doesn't have time or that she needs to talk to somebody else right now. Again, She's supposed to be clever but she's ignoring information that could be useful?
She's a princess who doesn't know how to dance? She's also extremely uneducated when it comes to other kingdoms. There are multiple times where she meets someone from a different country and she has to be told what their customs are by someone else, but then there are a few times where she knows every single thing there is to know about country. I just don't know if she's educated or not because it is not clear at all.
Alanitora just forgetting to tell Diane that her brother wasn't dead until she was close to tears was insane.
I'm sorry but I cannot believe we didn't know the king died until halfway into the book. Everybody keeps talking about how they don't even know if they have a kingdom to go back to, but I feel like they could have sent someone back to see what had happened after the fire. Also, are there not people living in this kingdom? Who is ruling them? We don't get a semblance of an answer to any of this until we have less than 100 pages left in the story. They should have gone back home the minute they learned that the king was dead. There was absolutely no reason to go through with the marriage after that (this is also brought up but it's the day of the wedding at that point).
Why did Raven fall in love with the princess in less than a day? She was making out with him on a balcony and she barely knew a single thing about him. And how did she not know he was thinking about marrying her when he literally told her that he'd picked someone the night before? His intentions were very clear when he said it and she was lost. What happened to reading people?
Owen is a soldier and he can't ride a horse. Owen can't do much of anything, actually. His sister is way more useful than him.
Elena explaining what facial structure is? Why?
Alanitora has to have a love triangle explained to her and it's not even explained correctly.
The only thing that kept me going when reading this was some of the side characters. They're all pretty shallow and only exist to advance Alanitoras character. Even then, she is described one way while she acts in a completely different way. I never got the feeling that she didn't have some love for her ladies and waiting, but there's a part where she is told to her face that she is super cold and uncaring to everybody. I just didn't see that. She's not even cold, she just has no personality at all.
The plot is very thin and hanging on by a thread. There's so many inconsistencies that I just started ignoring them. There was one thing that was in my mind the entire time, and that was a paper that is mentioned in the beginning of the story. I thought of this paper the entire time and it doesn't get mentioned again until we are in one of the last chapters. Alanitora even says that she tried to look for this paper and we don't see that on the pages. There's actually a lot of things that happen off screen in this story.
In conclusion, this story needs a lot of work. I think some outlining and heavy editing would do it some good. It's not bad and the potential is there.
The writing is okay. There's a lot of words that are not used correctly and it feels like the author just thought they sounded good. The book also has a lot of grammatical and editorial mistakes, which we are warned about in the beginning. Still it was a lot worse than I thought it was going to be and I feel like it could be easily fixed with a quick beta read.
The pacing is really weird. I was probably halfway through the book when one of the characters mentions that is hasn't even been a full week since the beginning of the story. If the map for this book is accurate, they travel over 200 miles on horseback in a few days and they constantly camp or stay at places during this time. This pacing also comes into play when you get characters telling other characters that they have changed so much over the course of the book, but again it's been a week. How much can you change in that span of time especially when not that much happens.
I wrote down some of my thoughts as I read the book.
The attempted assault of Alanitora by her own guard was...idk what to say about that. I think it was just a device used to show how she doesn't take shit from anyone, but I feel like it could've been done differently. This also happened maybe three chapters in and it just came out of left field for me.
The beginning is really weird when the king tells his daughter that she's going to be married to the prince of another kingdom. She immediately wonders how the succession is going to work and I wondered it too. His reply was that he's going to keep ruling for a long time and that's it. He doesn't actually answer her question as to what happens when he dies and his only heir is the queen of a different kingdom. We find out what was really going on here at the end of the book, but she only questions it once and never again.
She gets poisoned and none of her entourage knows about it?? Owen and Diane fight off a huge group of guards and have to carry the princess back to her carriage but none of the soldiers with them see this? What? Only one other soldier knows about it and it's because Owen told him.
Alanitora being described as super smart while constantly making the stupidest mistakes is so annoying.
She can read people, but this power rarely works. There's a part later on in the book where she makes a note of how her powers haven't been working like they should and she wonders if she can only read people from her own kingdom, but even when she was in her own kingdom she was horrible at reading people. She is constantly looking people right in the eye and seeing nothing wrong, only for something bad to go down a page later. There's maybe two or three characters who can block her powers and she's never suspicious that they can do this.
It is established pretty early that the soldiers guarding her are all bumbling fools and I don't understand why. These are trained soldiers from her kingdom and yet they act like they work for the circus. She also gets annoyed with the way they run things all the time and I don't know why she doesn't just order them to do what she wants since she is the princess and she is in charge of all of them.
There's this part where she gathers all her friends in her tent and says that everybody needs to clear the air and say what they know. Diane has stuff to say, but she cuts her off and doesn't let her say it. Then there's two other times where Diane approaches her because she wants to ask her something and she just tells her she doesn't have time or that she needs to talk to somebody else right now. Again, She's supposed to be clever but she's ignoring information that could be useful?
She's a princess who doesn't know how to dance? She's also extremely uneducated when it comes to other kingdoms. There are multiple times where she meets someone from a different country and she has to be told what their customs are by someone else, but then there are a few times where she knows every single thing there is to know about country. I just don't know if she's educated or not because it is not clear at all.
Alanitora just forgetting to tell Diane that her brother wasn't dead until she was close to tears was insane.
I'm sorry but I cannot believe we didn't know the king died until halfway into the book. Everybody keeps talking about how they don't even know if they have a kingdom to go back to, but I feel like they could have sent someone back to see what had happened after the fire. Also, are there not people living in this kingdom? Who is ruling them? We don't get a semblance of an answer to any of this until we have less than 100 pages left in the story. They should have gone back home the minute they learned that the king was dead. There was absolutely no reason to go through with the marriage after that (this is also brought up but it's the day of the wedding at that point).
Why did Raven fall in love with the princess in less than a day? She was making out with him on a balcony and she barely knew a single thing about him. And how did she not know he was thinking about marrying her when he literally told her that he'd picked someone the night before? His intentions were very clear when he said it and she was lost. What happened to reading people?
Owen is a soldier and he can't ride a horse. Owen can't do much of anything, actually. His sister is way more useful than him.
Elena explaining what facial structure is? Why?
Alanitora has to have a love triangle explained to her and it's not even explained correctly.
The only thing that kept me going when reading this was some of the side characters. They're all pretty shallow and only exist to advance Alanitoras character. Even then, she is described one way while she acts in a completely different way. I never got the feeling that she didn't have some love for her ladies and waiting, but there's a part where she is told to her face that she is super cold and uncaring to everybody. I just didn't see that. She's not even cold, she just has no personality at all.
The plot is very thin and hanging on by a thread. There's so many inconsistencies that I just started ignoring them. There was one thing that was in my mind the entire time, and that was a paper that is mentioned in the beginning of the story. I thought of this paper the entire time and it doesn't get mentioned again until we are in one of the last chapters. Alanitora even says that she tried to look for this paper and we don't see that on the pages. There's actually a lot of things that happen off screen in this story.
In conclusion, this story needs a lot of work. I think some outlining and heavy editing would do it some good. It's not bad and the potential is there.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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March 10, 2026I love this book I cant wait to get it
July 17, 2023
DNF at 260 pages. From what I read, it isn’t a terrible book. However, it is dreadfully slow and feels like there is no true substance or character growth. Seems unnecessarily long. The most exciting thing is what happened at her own kingdom and that was early on in the story.
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