The world building at the beginning was difficult to keep up with but kept pushing through. I finally started getting into the book and fell in love with the characters. I understand that endings don’t always get to be happy, but the ending of this book crushed me. I don’t even care to read the second book after the ending this one had.

“You deserve nothing less than someone who would burn this entire kingdom to the ground for your salvation.“⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣
– Dead Moons Rising, Jack Whitney

Finished reading Dead Moons Rising by Jack Whitney and I loved it! Amazing job! And the best thing is, it is self-published. Indie book, if I am correct, and deserves all the love it can get, BUT I have to warn every one of you first!

This book is a (Dark) Adult High-Fantasy and I highly recommend you read the TW first because there are some disturbing scenes. I was not affected, there happens nothing that has not happened in medieval times, but it can still be triggering for some readers. So, proceed with care!

The world-building was amazing. This is why I prefer fantasy books above all else. The worlds the authors create. I want to visit Haerland even though I'd probably die immediately.

Characters were alive, like really really alive and that is a rarity. Usually, the banter etc feels distant, but not in this book. And hey, I am a middle-aged lady and I was crying while reading.

And the plot, the actual story behind this beautiful cover. It immediately grabbed my attention. It is told by the Queen's perspective (finally) and gave new spices to the fantasy genre.

The only thing that bothered me once in a while was editing and grammar mistakes, but as English is not my native, I didn't care and continued reading.

I need more! Please! Can not wait anymore. I hate it when I find new books that are the beginning of the series and then there are the horrible 1-2 years waiting between reading.

Real score: probably 3.5 stars
TL;DR Review: This is clearly an early book by a new author. The editing is rough, it's LONG, and there are definitely large opportunities for improvement. But the FMC is strong, and the actual story itself is interesting.

Review

I will say that I understand all the DNF reviews. The first ~25% of this book is really rough both in terms of basic editing/proofreading, and understanding the story (more so than the average high fantasy book). There were a few occasions when I wanted to swap to something else for a breather, but I knew that if I didn't read this straight through, I'd never come back to it. It took me four days to get through it, which is about twice as long as I usually would take. In an attempt to keep this review short but fair, I'm just going to swap to some bullets behind the spoiler warning:

The Good:

Spoiler

- The FMC is 28. As an older reader myself, I am so thrilled to not be reading about an 18 year old saving the world.
- She's also a bad ass!
- The world is unique (enough) and the creatures within it are creative.
- The story itself, once I got into it, pulls you in. There is not much that you could skim, and the book wraps up one story line while leaving the way forward for the second clear.
- The editing DOES get better in the latter 50% of the book (although it's still not anything you'd see coming from a major publishing house).
- Despite my initial hesitations about this one, I'm excited to give the next book a chance and hope the author got a better editing team.

The Bad:
- Believe every review that says the editing is absolutely unbearable, in terms of basic grammar and word usage. There's a whole section that talks about the "purple whelps" the heroine got (welts), and the centuries (sentries) that they killed on the beach. The word "smarted" is used ALL THE TIME, as in: "He's fine," she smarted. The author's advanced readers/editors did her dirty with all these obvious mistakes and improper word usage.
- Secondly, the editing around sentence structure is atrocious. I'd post example sentences but other reviewers already have. Some are certainly "word soup".
- We get an in-depth review of almost every character's hair color, but almost nothing else. I actually do not know what most of the characters/races in the story look like, which is a pretty glaring issue in a 500 page book! Plenty of room to describe some characters/races.
- A pet peeve of mine, but the main character's nickname is Drae and her love interest is Draven.
- A truly ridiculous second pet peeve: the main character, several times, puts on a weird tulle cape skirt thing that covers her butt? I just hate the imagery. :D
- Rape is a heavy plot driver for the FMC's character development, between "brothers" and "sisters". It's mentioned only ONCE that they're not ~actually~ siblings (not that this makes it ANY better).

Final thoughts:
If you can get through the poor editing (and I do mean poor), I think this book is worth a read, if only so that you can read the next books. (I haven't read those yet so I may revise.) I can understand now why the author said there will be eight, because we're not following the story of the main characters in this book, but the land itself.

Great until the ending - ending felt unnecessary and made the entire book seem like a weird prequel

I would say this book is very good for a self published author. I loved the MC and her love interest so so much (and their spice so good man does jack know how to write a love scene) and the story line and overall plot was there. There could’ve been more focus on the threat in front of them instead of the MC making stupid decisions to go back home knowing her damn brother is gonna do some f*ck sh*t. Like come on. Then…..
The ending was a whole other level of wtf!!!
I give this book four stars for now but my anger for the ending may not subside. Props to jack for pulling something off no author would do and that I did NOT see coming whatsoever. But I have some serious trust issues now.
I did feel like some more editing of grammar and over descriptive paragraphs needs to be done but other than that I am interested in the rest of the series but I will be 10x more apprehensive next time as her plot twists are like a 100 knives to the heart.
Overall though I was on the edge of my seat and thought about this book every moment I wasn’t reading it!

The premise of this book is super interesting and the characters could be really great, however, the book itself was pretty badly written and the characters just fell flat.
There were so many grammar and punctuation mistakes which made the book a bit difficult to read at times. There were also a lot of weird word choices; it felt like the author opened a thesaurus and just chose the weirdest synonym she could find instead of using the "common" word.
The characters were largely very similar and by that I mean they were all so extremely horny and that was about it. Some were maybe even bloodthirsty AND horny.
It did get better by the second half of the book and I could appreciate the world-building that the author was trying to do. Sadly, like several other things in this book that also fell flat. The conflicts were generally interesting and I wish there would have been a larger focus on them.