Book One of the Amazzi Warriors and Queens Series!
City of Thera, year 1672 BC. The Temple of Potnia is on fire, and Kynna, a young priestess of the Temple, and her grandmother only option is to flee the island. They think they will be safe if they reach the Mycenaeans, but they are wrong: first, they are stuffed, with many more women, in a wagon, are treated like animals and eventually they stop. But instead of being in Mycenaeans’ territory, they are at Marjan’s estate, where women and children are traded like slaves.
Kynna and her grandmother, just like the other women there, are subjected to rough treatment and oppression, until Kynna can’t take it any longer. One night, after another round of beating from Marjan himself, Kynna finds a way to fight him, and she stops him long enough to give time to herself and her grandmother to run away.
In Kynna’s veins there is Amazzi blood, fighting comes to her quite natural, but her lineage is also one of the reasons why she was being held captive: Amazzi women are warriors, not submissive women who would do anything for their men and whose only reason to exist is to bear children and clean the house. They are fierce, proud and capable warriors, and because of that, they won’t simply do what is expected of them. All the contrary, they will always fight. This is why there are people like Marjan, who capture, enslave, trade and beat them into submission.
Myrine is also an Amazzi. She is a serving warrior in Apasas, under General Ikippe, and her life goal is to enter the Leopard Unit, a highly trained elite force. The first step toward this goal is to become a trainer, and soon she is selected by the General herself to cover one of the two trainer positions available in her unit. While out on patrol, in the hunting meadows of her village, she discovers Kynna and her grandmother, both in a terrible shape. She takes them both back to the village and asks her grandmother to help nurse them back to health. Kynna’s healing is quicker than her grandmother, and, incapable of simply sitting on her hands, she starts training too. She is an Amazzi, after all, and despite she has years of preparation to catch-up, she does her best but she is not a natural and in an ideal setting her preparation would take a very long time.
Kynna and Myrine become very close to each other, to the point that their friendship is on the verge of becoming something more. But will being both Amazzi and getting along like a house on fire be enough to keep them together? Kynna dreams of a family of her own, Myrine wants to be a General. Can love be enough to grow old together?
‘The Women of Apasas’ is a very good story, despite some confusion of points of view – some chapters are told from Myrine or Kynna’s perspective, other in third person.
The plot is thick and realistic, well developed and paced, the characters have a deepness to them and are almost 3D, to the point that they pop out of the page. Despite the Ancient Greece setting, Reign also takes into consideration very modern personal challenges, such as being attracted by boys and girls at the same time.
Dialogues are good, but they probably could have done with some more polishing, and the final cliffhanger definitely leaves the reader with the need for more. I would also have done with ‘less telling, more showing’, like more descriptions of the environment around the characters, connecting scenes where I could see how the feelings of the two girls for each other were growing deeper, instead of just being told in a few lines of dialogue.
This aside, I am really looking forward to tackling Book Two very soon.
‘The Women of Apasas’ is available for purchase at: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Women-Apasas-Elizabeth-Reign-ebook/dp/B097PTMKLB.
