Poison Study (Study #1)- Maria V. Snyder

And another post today! I'm sure all my imaginary followers are very happy now.

Poison Study Cover

Title: Poison Study (Study #1)
Author: Maria V. Snyder
Release Date: March 2004
Genre: YA, Fantasy, Romance
Rating: 4.5 Stars (I'm going to change my rating system really soon but for now it's still what I rated on Goodreads)













Goodreads Description

Choose: A quick death…Or slow poison...
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...

I read that book together with a friend and after a couple of chapters we always discussed it. And it was such a great book!

Yelena is our protagonist in this book and the story is told from her first person POV. The story plays in a area where we have Sitia, where magic is accepted and Ixia, which is ruled by a Commander who overthrew the king a couple years ago and who banned magic from Ixia. The story itself sounded from the beginning really great to me.

I love Yelena, she is so smart and she has a really strong mind. Another really important character is Valek, the chief of security who is a close friend to the commander. The two of them have to work close together and he really grows on you during the story.

The characters were really believable build. They weren't black or white and I absolutely loved that. There was a part where I was just suspecting about everyone and it was really fun talking about it with my friend.

But sometimes I just wanted to slap her because some of the things that were going on seemed pretty obvious to me and even though they suspected it NOBODY DID SOMETHING and it was so frustrating that I couldn't just reach into the book and be like "Okay guys, I'm here, I'm handling everything."

The magic became (and probably will even more in the following books) more and more important during the book and it didn't seem rushed or irreal or anything and I just really loved this as well.

Okay, what can I say. I really loved this book. There were some scenes that were written (and the action was really intense) so great that I just had to stop for a moment because I couldn't continue for a moment because in that moment I really felt it.

It was an awesome book, go read it.