BookView Review

Exley launches a sweeping fantasy saga in which freedom, destiny, and divided loyalties carry increasingly personal stakes. In Evanswood, Part 1, Quenleah, daughter of Pithany’s powerful High Lord, has spent her life concealing strange dreams and questions about the mother she never knew. When her closest friend slips away to the Black Pirate’s hidden stronghold, Quenleah follows. At Evanswood, she enters a world of rigorous training, secret loyalties, and startling connections to the visions that have haunted her since childhood. 

Evanswood, Part 2 finds Quenleah developing her mysterious gift of Sight while growing increasingly suspicious of the truths being withheld from her. A mission from the Black Pirate puts her closest loyalties under pressure and draws her into conflicts extending far beyond Evanswood. With rival powers closing in and trust increasingly difficult to place, Quenleah must determine what her emerging destiny demands of her. 

Across the two-volume series, Exley builds an expansive fantasy around a heroine whose desire for freedom becomes increasingly complicated by knowledge, attachment, and responsibility. Quenleah makes a strong center for the series: intelligent, stubborn, observant, and capable of questioning both the expectations imposed upon her and her own assumptions. Her evolution from sheltered noblewoman to skilled fighter and woman of Sight unfolds gradually, giving her accomplishments emotional credibility. The ensemble adds considerable texture. Sentune brings history and affection to Quenleah’s changing world, while the enigmatic Dansala remains compelling precisely because authority, protection, and secrecy coexist in him. Drake supplies the series’ strongest romantic tension. His connection with Quenleah develops amid duties and loyalties that make intimacy genuinely difficult, allowing the romance to carry consequences beyond attraction. 

Exley is particularly effective at linking the supernatural to character. Quenleah’s Sight, recurring dreams, and Evanswood’s uncanny atmosphere are woven into questions of identity and agency, while sword training, covert missions, political maneuvering, and shifting alliances keep the story moving. The leisurely development of Part 1 asks for patience, but its accumulation of relationships and mysteries gives Part 2 a substantial foundation from which to raise the stakes. Most resonant is the series’ treatment of freedom. Quenleah discovers that escaping other people’s plans does not end the claims of love, loyalty, or duty. Exley turns that tension into the saga’s defining question: once a person can see the road ahead, does freedom lie in refusing it or consciously choosing to walk it? 

A sweeping, soul-stirring fantasy where freedom is hard won and loyalty never simple.

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