(Cover picture courtesy of Goodreads.)

Sixteen-year-old Katherine Thompson wasn’t trained to rule a coven. That was her sister – perfect, beautiful Rose. But when a mysterious plane crash kills off the heir presumptive of the Sandersville coven she has no choice.

After stepping in to fill her sister’s shoes, Katherine realizes she didn’t have a clue – faery wars, depressed trolls and angry unicorns are just the beginning.

For centuries, her family has served the high Queens on both sides of the Atlantic but it is a well-known rule that mid-level witches stay away from high-level Queens.

But when Katherine’s youngest cousin vanishes without a trace in the Atlanta court and no one wants to investigate, Katherine decides to step into the darkness on her own. She will soon discover that nothing, especially in a queen’s court, is as it seems.

[Full disclosure: I requested and received a free ebook through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.]

First off, as with all of Terah Edun’s work (especially her Courtlight series), I was really impressed with the world-building here.  There are fairies, unicorns and trolls but they’re not really your typical fairies, unicorns and trolls.  Not only that, there are new creatures like Gestap that we encounter that are totally unique to Accession.  The politics between witches in different cities and towns was also interesting, even though we didn’t really see much of the inner workings of the courts in this first installment.  Still, what we did see was interesting and I’m definitely interested in finding out more.

Katherine is not a bad character but she’s not exactly my favourite narrator ever.  She’s more reactive than proactive as she comes into her new role as heir apparent to her mother, who rules the town as a Queen witch.  I’ll admit that it would be hard to find your feet in such a crazy place when you’ve never cared to learn the subtleties of area politics, but I was a little disappointed that Katherine didn’t really come into her own in the story.  She does grow stronger (I’ll admit) and grows as a character, but she really does have a long way to go.

The only thing I felt was actually lacking in Accession was the plot itself.  It doesn’t seem to be having that greater, over-arching goal that gives the character a sort of purpose.  Instead, we get bogged down in little subplots through the entire book before at the end we finally, finally get to the meat of the story before the cliffhanger ending.  Sure, Katherine’s goal of finding her sister’s killer is always in the back of her mind, but she doesn’t really seem to care as much as you’d think she would.  Katherine may have had her disagreements with her sister, but she really did love her and that’s why her lack of drive to find her killer struck me as odd.  It made it feel like the story was lacking a coherent plot.

Still, I have faith in Terah Edun that this series will only improve as it continues, just like the Courtlight series.  With that cliffhanger ending, I really can’t wait for the next installment to see whether Katherine truly matures or not.

I give this book 3.5/5 stars.

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