Review originally posted at RabidReads.com.

I know I don’t normally review audiobooks here, but since this was the only book in this series that is on audio. I’ll have to read the rest of the series, so I thought I would review them all in one place. The Mark of the Tala is the first book in the The Twelve Kingdoms series by Jeffe Kennedy. I met Ms. Kennedy at RT15 in Dallas and really wanted to read some of her books. I have read Petals and Thorns by her under a different pen name, and wanted to try this series next.

Andromeda is the middle sister. She never really stood out. Her older sister, Ursula, was quite the warrior and in training to run the kingdom when their father dies. Amelia is beautiful and has bards writing sonnets about her. Andi just wanted to ride her horses and fade to the background. They really don’t know their mother very well. She died giving birth to Amelia. Ursula is the only one who has any real memories and she was still young as a tween when her mother died.

Andi runs into a guy she has never met before while she is out riding. She is instantly drawn to him, but at the same time doesn’t trust him. She eventually learns that he is one of her mother’s people, the Tala. Andi and her sisters know almost nothing about their mother’s people. Their father forbade anyone to speak of them and any records of them destroyed. The Tala are known as “black witches”.

I loved Andi’s love for her horse, Fiona. I loved how she craved her horse and didn’t want to see her come to harm, but also knew that a horse is not as important as her people. It was a very difficult choice for her. It is something that would be very difficult for me as well. My animals are everything to me. I would have a hard time putting people in front of them as well.

I felt this was a very fun introduction fantasy romance series. I love the world that Ms. Kennedy has built. The characters are all very well developed. I want to learn more about all of them. I am a bit disappointed that this is the only book in the series that was put on audio. I would love to continue to series on audio, but I will continue to read the series, because I loved it so much.

Narration
Cris Dukehart does a great job with narration of this book. It is not the first book that I’ve listen to with her narration. She also does the Shifters Unbound series by Jennifer Ashley, which I started earlier this year. I think she does a great job. She handles both male and female characters with ease. I really enjoy her pace and tone. I do recommend her as a narrator.

The Twelve Kingdoms Series

I loved this book when I first read it in 2010, and my recent reread of it didn't disappoint. Although I reviewed it when I first read it, I decided I'd write a brand new review for my reread because 1) my reviewing style has changed since then and 2) I had some new things to say.

My first read of Sea of Wind took place several years after reading the first book. This time around, I read it right after finishing Sea of Shadow, and this had a definite effect on my understanding of what was going on and my feelings about it all.

Sea of Wind is set several years prior to Sea of Shadow and has a tighter focus. At the start of the book, we see a little boy who has been sent outside into the snow as punishment for what his grandmother believes is a lie. When he feels a gust of warmth and sees an arm beckoning him, he goes to it, and is taken to the world of the Twelve Kingdoms. The boy is told his name is Taiki and that he is the kirin of the Kingdom of Tai. He doesn't really know what's going on, but he feels safe around Sansi, the lamia that was born to protect him until he reached adulthood.

The entire book deals with Taiki adjusting to life among the oracles at the Brush-Jar Palace. Although they tell him he's a kirin, he doesn't feel like one, and he's worried that he'll never be able to do what these nice people expect of him. He can't shift into his kirin form, he can't see kirin auras, he can't pacify even the tiniest of demons, and he's sure he'll never have the revelation that is supposed to help him choose the next king of Tai.

After Yoko's grueling journey in Sea of Shadow, Taiki's story was a breath of fresh air. He desperately wanted to be loved and to please those who cared about him. While in our own world, he couldn't do that: his grandmother found fault with everything he did and made his mother cry, his little brother didn't like him, and his father sided with his grandmother. In the world of the Twelve Kingdoms, he was adored by everyone around him. Seeing him move from the one life to the other gave me warm fuzzies, even though I felt sad about what it must have been like for his mother in our world when he suddenly disappeared.

Unfortunately, Taiki wasn't used to getting unconditional love. He fretted over his inability to do the things the oracles expected of him. The oracles, in turn, protected him from the full knowledge of the importance of his existence and duties. Taiki had no idea that, even as he spent each day enjoying the love and attention of the oracles, the people of Tai were suffering and would continue to suffer until he finally chose a king.

I don't think I realized until this reread just how sheltered Taiki was, and just how precarious his position was. As powerful as Taiki turned out to be, his will was incredibly weak. He was timid and filled with self-doubt. As a kirin, Taiki would be expected to advise his king, but I couldn't imagine him 1) finding the courage to voice his opinions or 2) being able to defend his opinions even if he did manage to voice them. While I very much enjoyed the book's ending, it didn't change how I felt about Taiki's future. Knowing that Taiki and his king were declared either dead or missing only a few years later, I couldn't help but feel a little ill despite the book's fairly happy ending.

One of the nice things about rereading this book so soon after rereading the first one was that I could see more of the connections between the two. For example, in Book 1 Enki stated that the kirin is a pitiful creature. Book 2 gave a much better sense of what he meant. Taiki was used to the idea of free will, so it took him a while to wrap his brain around the idea that he literally could not go against the mandate of Heaven. Because he was young, he didn't seem to realize the implications of that. The kings, who have no say in being declared kings, have more choices than the kirin do, even if one of those choices happens to be death.

It was nice seeing more of Keiki in this book, including a tiny bit from his perspective. In the first book, he appeared to be stiff, cold, and seriously lacking in empathy. This book allowed me to warm up to him a bit more. As it turned out, Keiki had exceptionally bad people skills, to the point that even the oracles chided him. He had no clue how to deal with his current king (the “Lady-King” who ruled just prior to Yoko) or the very sensitive Taiki. I now wish that Sea of Shadow had shown a bit from his perspective. I imagine that at least a part of him must have been worried about repeating some of the same mistakes he'd made with his first king with Yoko. It was lucky for him that Yoko turned out to be stronger and more flexible than his first king. (It feels kind of weird referring to two women as “kings.")

I'm glad this reread went so well. Although Yoko made for a stronger and more complex protagonist than Taiki, I still found myself preferring Book 2 to Book 1. The story was gentler, and the world and its rules were more clearly presented.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

The Twelve Kingdoms is one of my top favorite Japanese light novel series, although it's not without its problems, and it took reading the second book and seeing the anime for me to start feeling that way. I wanted to finally read the fourth book, but it's been four years since I read the second and third and more than six since I read the first, so I decided that it'd be best to start from the beginning.

This book introduces the world of the Twelve Kingdoms via Yoko Nakajima, a high school student in Japan. When we first meet her, Yoko is as bland and inoffensive as she can make herself. Pretty much the only thing that makes her stand out and that she refuses to change is her hair, which is red enough to look like it's been dyed. She prefers to wear it long, even though it looks redder that way, and even though her mother keeps pushing her cut or dye it so she'll blend in better.

Then one day a man with strange clothes and golden hair appears at Yoko's school and tries to take her away. She refuses, at first, until terrifying creatures she'd previously only seen in her dreams suddenly attack. The man, Keiki, hands her a sword and tells her to fight. When Yoko protests that she doesn't know what to do, Keiki tells Joyu, a jellyfish-like creature, to attach itself to her and help her, forcing Yoko to kill for the first time in her life. They escape to a strange new world and are soon separated. All Yoko wants is to go home, but first she has to find Keiki and figure out how to survive in a place where everyone and everything seems to either want to kill her or betray her.

I had vague memories of not really enjoying the first book, but also not hating it so much as to cross the entire series off my TBR list. I liked it more this time around, because I had a better understanding of what was going on and what it was all leading towards, but it wasn't exactly an enjoyable read. This book is 459 pages long, and over 300 of those pages featured bad things happening to Yoko. She was betrayed multiple times, forced to kill demons every night, tormented by visions of home, and taunted by a blue monkey that seemed determined to throw all her worst thoughts and actions in her face. She'd have died of her wounds, starvation, and exhaustion multiple times over had it not been for a jewel that Keiki gave her.

Like I said, not pleasant, and it didn't help that Yoko wasn't very likeable either. When she was in Japan, she said nothing when a group of students bullied another girl, because she was afraid of being their next victim. She also lied to others in order to avoid confrontation. She spent her first days in the world of the Twelve Kingdoms refusing to allow Joyu to fully help her, because the bloodshed horrified her. As her experiences wore her down, it became harder and harder for her to trust anyone, to the point that she contemplated stealing from or even killing someone who had previously helped her. While I could sympathize with some of Yoko's thoughts and actions, dealing with them for 300 pages was a bit much.

The good thing is that Yoko was forced to take a long, hard look at the person she'd been and who she'd become. While she wasn't given a choice about her role in the Twelve Kingdoms, she at least got to decide how she wanted to proceed. One of my favorite moments was when she met Keiki again and he realized how much she'd grown as a person since the last time he saw her. He'd named her his master because he'd had no choice, so his more complete acceptance of her by the end of the book was nice. Keiki was barely in this book, so I think the second book may have colored my perception some. Although it deals with a different set of characters, it provides a closer look at

The writing didn't work for me, for reasons I can't explain. However, I found the world of the Twelve Kingdoms to be fascinating enough to make up for that. Whenever Yoko spent more than a few minutes with anybody, she usually received a lecture on some aspect of the Twelve Kingdoms. It should have been boring, especially on a reread, but I ate it up. I loved learning about life in the kingdoms of Kou, Kei, and En. Rakushun, a hanjyu (half-beast) with the form of a rat, was a fount of fascinating information. I loved him for that, as well as for being incredibly nice.

All in all, this was definitely worth a reread. During my first read, I was as clueless about what was going on as Yoko. Having a better understanding of the world meant that certain scenes had more impact for me this time around. I admit, though, that I'm now even more disappointed at the way Ono structured the series. While this first book reunites Yoko and Keiki, by the end Yoko is still in danger, the false ruler is still in power, and the king of Kou is still out there. And instead of continuing the story, the next two books take readers to earlier points in the world's timeline. It's frustrating. The anime does a better job of tying those loose threads up before moving on.

(Original review, with read-alikes and watch-alikes, posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)