Reviewed by Chris
TITLE: The Soul Forge
SERIES: Sacred Guardian #3
AUTHOR: J.A. Jaken
PUBLISHER: White Owl Publishing
LENGTH: 611 pages
RELEASE DATE: April 30, 2018
BLURB:
The country of Kazure bows under the shadow of war as the Shindori lords from the east continue to wage their holy crusade. Kaori Sansa, the High Lord of Kazure, is desperately searching for a way to defend his people while he struggles to determine which of the lords in his own country can be trusted to see the war through. Meanwhile, Hunter confronts his inner demons as the horrors of his past come back to haunt him, and he comes face to face with the criminal organization that enslaved him as a child. Both men must fight to uphold their oaths—both to Kazure and to each other—while the forces gathering around them are doing everything in their power to bring them down.
REVIEW:
I’ve had a bit of a love-frustrate relationship with this series so far. I can’t really call it love-hate, since there has never been anything about these books that has made me hate them, but there have certainly been parts that frustrate the ever living fuck out of me. So going in I was a bit wary. For all that I have ended up loving the world building and the characters, I kinda had no desire to read another 500+ pages of a story where all I really wanted to do was smack some sense in to Kaori.
And, well. Turns out that wasn’t a problem this time around. Hallelujah.
It probably helped that this book was split up into the three main povs of Kaori, Hunter, and Haku (one of Kaori’s guards). Each of these three threads have their own goal and struggles, but tie up together by the end. Kaori actually has the least impact on the story overall. Mostly he is there to get the other threads in motion. He sends Hunter after the men in charge of the child kidnapping/slavery ring plaguing the country, and he sends Haku over the border into Shindori on what looks like a suicide mission to persuade the woman “ruling” the country to perhaps meet with Kaori so to come to some kind of peace.
A lot of what goes on with the three main povs of this book are spoilers, so I’ll leave it at that, but I will say that I was greatly impressed by not only how the story worked within this structure to create a greater whole, but how I was invested in each one of them nearly to the same degree. The stakes in all three were pretty big, but the way they played off each other made it so that you wanted to focus on the here and now, even though you were still worried about where the story left the other characters when their sections ended.
Also, oh my god, Kaori is finally starting to act more like a king. He still has the tendency to want to protect everyone around him (even at the cost of his own life), but he has finally started to see that he can’t be that person. No matter how much it hurts him to see those he cares about be put in danger by his words and his commands. This tendency to fling himself into danger has been one of the most frustrating parts of this series so far, so I felt weirdly proud when he took that step back. He certainly doesn’t value life any less–which I’m glad about because that would have been a weird character flip between books if it had happened–but he is growing up, and I like that.
I still have a few issues with this story, though there a less than the two previous books. And mostly they are just trivial things that just annoy because it feels like they happened because certain events in the story had to happen, so some people had to do some really stupid things in order for the bad guys to actually get that far in their plan. Without giving anything away, let’s just say that Kaori and his guards know that an attack is highly probable, but for some reason have just about the laxest security on the planet for reasons I can not even fathom. Well, other than Plot! had to happen. It was, well, frustrating to have this happen when the book had been doing such a good job up to that point. It didn’t ruin the story, but my god did it make me roll my eyes.
But it did manage to keep the tension up and the stakes high even when that eye rolling was happening, so I can’t fault it too much.
As things are, I am really happy with what I got out of this story, and am really glad to see the way the characters are growing and changing over the course of this series. I’m going to assume with the way the book ended that a book four is in the offing, and I can’t wait to get back to this journey when it does finally come out. For all my issues with the way certain characters were acting in past stories, as a whole I can start to see how those things kinda needed to be there in order for the characters to be who they are going to become by the end. I really am glad I’ve stuck it out this far, because I think by the time I get to the end of the series I am going to end up really loving the whole experience.
RATING: 
BUY LINK: