Book Review: The Throne of Broken Gods

Title: The Throne of Broken Gods
Author: Amber V. Nicole
Genre: Romantasy, Fantasy, Fiction, Romance

What It’s About:

Dianna goes on a rampage after the death of her sister—finding Camilla and her coven first. Camilla had decided to go against the grain of what the others on TV had done—and she waited for Dianna to come to her at her house. She then tells Dianna that she has Gabby’s body, taking her to it. Dianna tells her that for this, she has some forgiveness, and tells her of their customs on their home country. Dianna then has Camilla help her work on things that help her get vengeance for her sister’s death. She finds and kills both Ethan, his wife, and Drake—for the two vampires had sold Gabby out for Ethan’s wife. And this happens while all three vampires are under Samkiel’s protection. Samkiel, who has since dropped Liam as his name, starts to show up on the news as per Vincent’s request. He tries to reason with her the first time, but Dianna is set on vengeance and ignores him, telling him to get out of the way.

Then Dianna burns down a hotel where a criminal who was helping Kaden move iron was hiding out. She uses his form to gain access to to a meeting space where she plays cards with a group of criminals who give her information on a ship that will be leaving with more iron. She kills them, leaving only one of them alive. Samkiel has found himself following the breadcrumbs from the investigation into the burnt down hotel where Dianna had killed the criminal, then to the secret meeting space, where he asks the other guy some questions—the guy tells him that Dianna had chosen to not kill him after she saw the picture of his wife and him on the front of his phone. Samkiel then follows a ship out of the harbor out of curiosity, and goes to check it out. This is where Dianna and Samkiel meet again, after finding Santiago, the witch coven leader who has sided with Kaden. Samkiel has cut off his hands so he can’t do magic, but then Dianna kills Santiago, ultimately sinking the ship due to the fire. Still, she continues to push Samkiel away, but he refuses to be pushed away.

At some point, Dianna goes to see Rocurrem, the fate, and frees him to get him to help her find Kaden, because she really wants to kill him. She gives him the name Reggie while they move through the mortal realm. Roccurem shows up at Samkiel’s place and warns him that Dianna will come up and that he is going to have to capture her. As a result of this, the group has captured Camilla, who says she wants to help them. Dianna shows up at the headquarters of the Hand, and Samkiel lets her fight him, having her follow him in frustration to an area where they have set a trap for him. He then kisses her when she falls on top of him during the fight, and she kisses him, before passing out. Dianna finds herself in a cell along with Camilla in a nearby one. Samkiel comes to talk to her and tell her that he will do anything to fix this and help her. While she sits in the cell, Roccurem brings dream eaters and puts everyone in the complex under their control. Samkiel wakes up and fights them off, and then goes to wake up the rest of the celestials, including Xavier—who Cameron had known was having nightmares of the time that he was in the cave when Xavier’s sister died. Dianna escapes with Roccurem’s help, and then they disappear.

Samkiel is required to attend a meeting/ball with the ambassadors and mortals. During this meeting, Logan speaks with one of the mayors/ presidents who tells him that there is a huge sinkhole in their area. This piques his interest because he has been looking for Neverra in all of the locations on the map with connections to Kaden, but that this sinkhole has suddenly happened is strange. He had been yelled at by Samkiel so that he doesn’t die, but he decides to sneak out of the party on his own and goes to the location. There, he runs into Dianna and they fight off the otherworldly creatures. They argue a bit and he tells her that he is looking for Neverra because he can’t live without her. Dianna agrees to help him, and gives him a stone telling him that he should find Neverra and get out—she had planned to follow the portal anyway, and to save Neverra. They go in after Tobias, and a fight breaks out —Dianna learns for the first time that they can only be harmed in their true forms as Ig’Morruthen, which in her case, is the wyvern. Tobias also tells her that she is not Gabriella’s true sister, which throws her off but she ignores the comment, and then ends up killing him. In the meantime, Logan had found Neverra and they fight their way out towards Dianna, because Neverra reveals that her conversations with Gabby had lead her to learn more about Dianna and that Gabby never wanted her to be alone—she wanted family. So they decide to stay with Dianna and fight side by side with her. Due to the amount of Ivirkuva that they are facing, Dianna is forced to open a portal on her own—Logan had lost the stone in the fight to Neverra—and thinks about a safe space. The portal opens in the ceiling of the building where Samkiel and his Hand are—she throws Neverra and Logan in, and falls herself through the portal, surprised when Samkiel catches her. Kaden shows his face but is unhappy when she’s past the portal and sees that Samkiel has her in his arms. Dianna passes out and Samkiel takes her to the house in Rashearim.

There, he had built her a beautiful palace-like home, and Dianna begins to heal, slowly but surely with conversation with Samkiel as well as his actions. Neverra comes to visit her after she had woken up to give her a letter from Gabby—one that Dianna reads and cries to, then spends days in bed. Samkiel does take time to go to Yejedin, the planet that Dianna, Logan and Neverra had been on, and finds a giant troll. Eventually he goes back to the troll and the troll tells him some information about the planet and the beings there. Xavier and Cameron sneak Dianna out onto Onuna for a club nigh, where she gets attacked by Vampires—run by Drake’s former lover—and Samkiel save her. When they’re back on Rashearim, Samkiel yells at Cameron and Xavier, but Dianna takes the blame, telling him it was her fault—and the two guys respect her. Cameron and Xavier talk afterwards and reveal that actually Roccurem had put them up to this.

Samkiel takes Dianna to the beach and makes her face her feelings about how much Gabby loved the beach and that she would not be able to take her to one again. Then Cameron, Xavier, Neverra, Logan and Imogen show up at the behest of Dianna, to play on the beach with her and they have a great time. Imogen and Neverra stay the night and do a girl’s spa day, taking pictures of themselves together, before passing out. Dianna then gets help from Neverra about making a date happen with Samkiel, and asks him for a single day for them to spend. They go to Onuna, her planet, where she takes him ice skating, and then she takes him to an abandoned home—the first home that she and Gabby had owned but never finished renovating. They end up having sex for the first time there, and have to escape because of a noise complaint, after Samkiel makes her laugh with a joke that the Hand is outside.

Neverra and Dianna decide to slip into the archives to find out more about Dianna and her sister, because Tobias’s comment bothers her. Unfortunately before they are able to get a good look at the file, the Ivirkuva arrive and Dianna and Neverra escape. When they get to the house on Rashearim, Neverra gives her a file—one that she had grabbed from the files they were looking into on her family—and Dianna sits down to read them. In it, she finds that Gabby was their parent’s biological daughter, but that she had been adopted. At first she wants to hide this, but ultimately she decides to share this with Samkiel, as a sign of trust, and he listens to her explain everything. Separately, Neverra and Logan approach Samkiel and tell him that they want to leave the Hand after all of this is done because they want to start a family and live in peace. Samkiel agrees and then thinks through it.

Dianna offers to host a party for their friends and family, and everyone will be showing up as agreed upon, except for Vincent, who had an argument with Samkiel that he doesn’t like Dianna and that he’s the only one who is making any sense and thinking clearly because Dianna is an Ig’Morruthen. Cameron, Xavier, Imogen, Neverra, and Logan show up to the house for a dinner party, and later Vincent comes late with some dessert. They have a good time, and Dianna steps outside to take a moment to watch the sky and think of Gabby. Xavier talks to her for a bit before they both come back inside. During the dinner, Samkiel reveals that he will be disbanding the Hand once Kaden is gone, and they can live their lives, which makes the members of the Hand happy and bewildered at the same time as they aren’t sure what they would do with themselves. As everyone leaves, Neverra gives Dianna a framed picture of the three of them getting their spa day done, and Dianna puts it next to a framed picture of herself and Gabby. As Cameron and Xavier leave, the two of them talk, and Xavier reveals that his boyfriend had proposed to him and that he intends to say yes—that he has given Cameron all of this time to reciprocate his feelings and he hasn’t, while his boyfriend treats him right. Xavier then flies off to his home.

Dianna wakes up the next morning alone as Samkiel had decided to go in to the council to do a meditative session to meet with another being—one that is a step up from fate, and is all knowing. She relaxes at home and hangs out. Samkiel does the ritual and speaks with this being, who takes on the form of Dianna, and reveals that Dianna was always his amata-she is Azrael’s first daughter, and that she was prophesied to bring great change having been born on or near a blood moon. She also reveals that Kaden is Samkiel’s brother along with two other siblings that Samkiel has through Unir. Kaden had been Unir’s general and son until he and his brother were put on Yejedin as a form of imprisonment by Unir. When Samkiel comes back to his body, he finds himself trapped by ancient markings, and learns that the council had actually been infiltrated with Vincent in charge. Vincent is holding Camilla with him, having spent a lot of time with her while she was in her holding cell.

In the meantime, Logan had woken up to a feeling of someone being in his house, and it is Kaden. Neverra shows up and he tells her that she needs to help him fight off Kaden, but instead Neverra protects him, and then Kaden has Logan’s mind taken over. Cameron gets a phone call from Xavier in the early morning, but it’s actually Kaden on the other line, and Kaden tells him to come to him at a club, or else Xavier will be killed. Cameron shows up and demands to know what Kaden has done to Xavier as he is unresponsive and distant, and then Kaden tells him that he will come to follow him willingly in order to protect Xavier. Sure enough, Cameron drinks Kaden’s blood and becomes an Ig’Morruthen. Dianna has been kidnapped by Kaden and taken to Yejedin, where she is placed on a stone table, and tied. Kaden reveals to her that she is Azrael’s oldest daughter; that she was destined to make a change in the world order, and so to protect her from being discovered by Unir, Azrael had taken her to Onuna, where he hid her by adopting her out to a family. After all, why else would the area that Dianna grew up in be a desert—it only happens when a Celestial hits the world with huge force. And he had occasionally come to see her as her father, teaching her how to fight. Kaden reveals that Dianna should have never met Samkiel, and that they had thought they would be able to keep him apart. Kaden cuts her wrists open, and tells Azrael to carry the buckets of blood to the weapon that he puts into a mold, finally making the weapon he needs to kill Samkiel. Kaden tells Azrael to stop Dianna from leaving.

Samkiel sees Cameron in the room behind Vincent, as portals open up and Kaden shows up while he’s chained. Nismera and Isaiah also show up —both of whom are siblings to Kaden and Samkiel. Nismera grabs the weapon from Kaden and after talking briefly to Samkiel, she stabs him with the weapon, causing his magic and power to erupt into the heavens in a silvery glow. She leaves him to bleed out while starts to walk away with Vincent and some of the hand as well as Isaiah and Kaden in tow.

Dianna gets the feeling that she needs to go now, and breaks the chains. She tries to plead with Azrael, and there is a momentary hesitation when he calls her Ayala, the name she was given at birth, before he corrects himself and is once more a shell. She tells him that if he’s still there, to know that he gave her the best home that he could, where she was loved, and then she kills him, before flying off in her wyvern form. Dianna shows up in front of Samkiel just as everyone has started to leave, and grabs him. There are some words exchanged, and Nismera attacks her with the weapon that Kaden had created using Dianna’s blood, when Roccurem shows up and saves them from the attack, just as Dianna portals them out. Fate is usually not meant to intervene but he had, and had been cut apart. She portals them back to Yejedin, where she puts Samkiel on the stone, and he tells her that he loves her. Roccurem confirms that they are amatas and that she would have the symbol of Dhinshin if she had been in time. She wonders if she could still save Samkiel and yells at the universe and Death that she will tear it apart to atoms if Samkiel does not live, before saying that she will pay any price. She says that she loves him, and then she watches as magic swirls around her during which the mark of Dhinshin—the mark showing that they are soulmates— appears before it disappears, and Samkiel lives.

My Thoughts:

I enjoyed the duality in this book in which Dianna is a destructive person—going out for vengeance against those who had been there when Kaden had killed Gabby—but also showing mercy for example to Camilla for getting Gabby’s body for her without her asking, or to Logan when she reveals that she was planning on sending Neverra back after finding her when they go into Yejedin for the first time. I felt the emotions that the author had painted of loss and grief and seeing Dianna go through those stages, especially once she was in Rashearim, and how Samkiel made her face those feelings while simultaneously being there to support her, going to show that sometimes being forced to face things even when you’re not ready, is going to be the better for healing than just sitting around and moping. I really enjoyed seeing her grow to care for Neverra and Imogen especially in light of arguments with Samkiel about Imogen being his betrothed when Kaden put that notion into her mind. Overall, it was a lovely story, and I loved seeing how the author goes between planets, and although the book was fast paced—skipping months and weeks sometimes at a time—I did not mind it at all, as I felt it covered the major events and developed the feelings and storyline between the characters. Besides I would have found reading day to day tactics and information on the investigations that they were doing into finding Dianna and Kaden very boring. My heart breaks for Dianna though, because what does it mean that she no longer has the Mark of Dhinshin-the mark of the soulmates or the amatas? What does that mean for them going forward?