Hope and Red (Empire of Storms #1) by Jon Skovron

Overall Rating: 3.5 Stars

Date Finished: September 20, 2016

When I read that this was a combination of pirates and samurai I was both intrigued and doubtful that it could be pulled off well. It’s hard to find a good Samurai book at all, yet alone one with pirates mixed in.

This story follows our two main characters, Red and Hope.

Hope is the only survivor of deadly experimentation performed on her village. She is taken in by Monk warriors and the leader secretly trains her in the art of fighting. He is killed for teaching a female and she escapes with the goal of exacting her revenge. In the mean time she works as security on a ship.

Red is a rare survivor of a drug addicted mother and is marked by the drug with red eyes. He spends some time living life as a pirate (really just a couple of months) and mostly gets by as a thief in the ghetto.

Now, while the Samurai part of this book is showed through Hope, Red really isn’t a pirate for very long and is not until the end of the book that the whole pirate thing becomes a big part of the book, and that is really more hinting at what we will see in the next book, not so much what you see in this book.

That being said, I really enjoyed the characters in the book. Red is such a great character and I loved his comments and humor. Hope was definitely more closed off but I also enjoyed seeing how she started to open up around Red.

The thing that I will say, is that I felt like there was too much going on. At first all of the action is great and amazing and you’re just soo excited to get things underway, but then it never really ends. The fight in the ghetto was a big deal in and of itself. I figured that there would a big fight for the ghetto, they would win and then things would wrap up and the rest would be left for the next book. But it just continues almost nonstop. You have the tracking, the fight in the rich neighborhood, the flight to the docks, the chase over the sea, and then the big fight at the end of the book. And you also have a few different POV’s thrown in there as well. Now, all of that was well written and enjoyable but at one point I just kind of wanted the author to get to the point.

Now, having reached the end if became obvious that most of that was necessary in order to gather together all of the crew that they would need to take on the Empire in the next book, and it all makes sense in hindsight, but while reading I found myself just wanting the author to finally wrap things up.

I wasn’t too happy with how the ending separated Red and Hope and it will be interesting to see how things pan out in the next book because Red was my favorite character and I don’t know if it will be the same if he is unrecognizable after all the alterations.