Title: Betrayal's Price
Author: Lisa Blackwood
Date: 2015
Publisher: Lisa Smeaton
Quote: "Ashayna...preferred the name 'sentience.' It was less dire than calling herself demon-possessed."
Ashayna has been reborn as a human, or humanoid resident of an alien world, anyway, and because of the sins of a past life she's now fated to marry a phoenix, or resident of this world with phoenix-like traits. If you read "phoenix" and think "animal of which there was only ever one in the world" and then try to remember that in this novel it means "one of a species that have birdlike and humanlike traits," the cognitive dissonance may spoil the fantasy for you, as it does for me. Or it may not. This story has gone on and grown into a series.
Even if the spirits that inhabit Ashayna and Sorntar, her phoenicoid Partner for Life, are more benign than the humans feared, my feeling is that this fantasy aims too high and falls short of its aims. Not all readers agree.
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