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Daughter of immortals. Princess Diana longs to prove herself to her legendary warrior sisters. But when the opportunity finally comes, she throws away her chance at glory and breaks Amazon law—risking exile—to save a mortal. Diana will soon learn that she has rescued no ordinary girl, and that with this single brave act, she may have doomed the world. Daughter of death. Alia Keralis just wanted to escape her overprotective brother with a semester at sea. She doesn’t know she is being hunted by people who think her very existence could spark a world war. When a bomb detonates aboard her ship, Alia is rescued by a mysterious girl of extraordinary strength and forced to confront a horrible truth: Alia is a Warbringer—a direct descendant of the infamous Helen of Troy, fated to bring about an age of bloodshed and misery. Together. Two girls will face an army of enemies—mortal and divine—determined to either destroy or possess the Warbringer. Tested beyond the bounds of their abilities, Diana and Alia must find a way to unleash hidden strengths and forge an unlikely alliance. Because if they have any hope of saving both their worlds, they will have to stand side by side against the tide of war.
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2.5 stars
So... this book is pretty dull. It's a slow start, with the beginning feeling painfully dragged out and
uninteresting.
The characters Bardugo introduces are okay, but they all get pretty annoyed by the end and end up being generic YA characters. That's my main issue with this book, it doesn't feel like a Wonder Woman story. It feels like a YA story focused on Greek mythology. There's nothing particularly... wonderful about it.
I think it also has an issue in that it tries too hard to follow the basic structure of the movie (obviously differences in plot and characters mean it doesn't exactly match) which helped me figure out when x twist was happening, when x fight was going to happen, etc. I find this a shame as there was a lot of potential with this book - once the story left Diana's home island the pace picked up, and up until the last 100 pages it was pretty engaging. Ultimately, it did not start or resolve in interesting ways, and so much of it felt very generic or uninspired.
There's also some central idea about comparisons of male focused myths and legacies to the specific female gods and legends as some metaphor about feminism in a patriarchal society but the concept doesn't really go anywhere. There is also a surprising amount of technology featured in the book, but Bardugo couldn't seem to decide what type of technology would fit her story so settled with vaguely defined eugenic and genetic treatments... I think. I've been spoiled by more coherent fantasy recently haha
Frankly, the mo for this book seemed to be 'YA Greek fantasy' than a specific Wonder Woman story, which I'm sure is fine for some. But when you don't *really* have a villain until the last 50 pages, and a lot of what came before is awkward 'sexual' tension between characters with little chemistry, you might have a problem.
On the plus side however, the hardback edition of this book is goooooooorgeous
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