4 out of 4 stars
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In A Thread In Time by Jess Thomas, Trend has happily returned to his clan, mate, and family. The peace is broken when Zihen, Vega's mate, is kidnapped. Vega will pay any price to get him back, but Trend worries that the price might be too high for the clan to pay. Darius is in the care of Gak and several clan members while others search for Vega's mate. The clan members who cannot fight must hide in the library, which leaves many of them feeling helpless. The loss of a mate is tearing apart Trend's clan in more ways than one, but they are determined to make it through together and go back to living peaceful lives.
I was so excited to be able to read a fantasy novel that included a clan with both same-sex and heterosexual relationships. It was integrated into the book smoothly, so it seemed as if it was normal in this universe. Finding diverse fantasy novels like these can be difficult, so this book was definitely a gem in that sense.
When I chose this book, I thought that it could be read as a standalone. After reading the novel, I have come to the conclusion that it could be read as a VERY basic standalone. The characters do spend a lot of time discussing the events that occurred in previous novels, which made it easy for me to get into the story as a new reader. What I struggled with was differentiating the characters. Since this is already book number 14 in this series, there were 13 books of background knowledge that I had to catch up on. After reading this novel, I am going to go back in my own time and read the previous books in the series. Each character is truly unique, and I want to know more about all of them. I would also suggest to a person thinking about reading this that they actually start at the beginning of the series and work their way to this one, just so that they can really know the characters.
The stories of these characters are so detailed that I love to learn more about them. Darius has a special relationship with Trend, as he has known him for many years, and through this, he has a whole side story that discusses his relationship with his older brother. Trend's mate was looking for him in other dimensions and has an entire story about his lives in those worlds. These are the two side stories that stood out to me the most, but I know that there were definitely many more in the previous installments of this series.
I rated this book 4 out of 4 stars. There were no editing errors that I could see, the plot moved smoothly, and the characters were all full of life. There were also no huge time-skips in the middle of the story, which is rare for a fantasy novel these days. The only thing that I didn't like was the fact that I hadn't read the books prior to this one to get to know these lovely characters even more. This is definitely a must-read for diverse fantasy lovers.
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A Thread in Time
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