Stormbreaker by Nisha J. Tuli

The quick cut: A nineteen-year-old girl with forbidden power finds her life in danger as an outsider joins their training - and threatens the balance of her life.  

A real review: 

 Everyone has their own paths to decide, even if our friends or parents may try to get us to choose otherwise. Will you hold your ground and go with the path you want your life to take? Or let it all go in order to keep the relationships you have? These are difficult and real questions for Poet.

 Poet is the daughter of one of the scion leaders of the four main houses in New Manhattan. While it comes with power and prestige, it also comes with a significant amount of pressure as well. Her father, the Scion, has some very specific expectations for her, including marrying a boy named Knox who clearly does not respect her. When she begins training and is forced to choose a house to do challenges for, she finds herself drawn to aligning to a different house. Pushing her even further to this decision, oddly enough, is an outsider known as a solitude. Will Poet continue on the path her father wants her to take? Or will she make her own choices, even if it threatens her life? 

 This book has a number of factors that make it hard to completely fall into the world built here, but the characters are so rich and believable. Poet at her core is struggling with whether she wants to be her own person or the person her family expects her to be. Seeing her choose that path is the core plot of the story and while it is a fantasy at its core, it's a struggle any reader can relate to. Deciding to be true to you is a lot harder than it can seem. 

 Poet from the outside seems to have everything that anyone could want. In reality though, she's got an aggressive and angry father who clearly abuses his family physically. She also has a fiance who she did not choose of her own volition who openly uses the same behavior as her father. Her fiance also makes no qualms about openly flirting with other girls and cheating on her. She's shown to society as being powerful, but in reality all the power she has is the ability to make her own choices. She knows what life is being carved out for her and it's very much the one her mother currently lives. While choosing her own path comes with its dangers and uncertainties, it also comes with the possibility of true joy. 

 The political system here of the four houses actually makes a lot of sense and is very reminiscent of Veronica Roth's series named Divergent. Where it takes its own path is the Solitudes. That is also where the complexity begins because while there is supposedly an agreement of peace, there's also aggression that happens between the two. This created a confusion for me that bothered me throughout the story. 

 A fantasy story about a post-climate change world with a setup for a second book.  

My rating: 4.5 out of 5