Vanora wakes up on her eighteenth birthday to a crimson sky and the crisp beginnings of Autumn. It is the day of her Recognition, the day she needs to prove her worth and prove she is powerful enough to be not only the Princess, but the next Healer of the Kingdom of Alethedreda.
However, destiny has other plans. The curling fog of doom has reached the drawbridge of the castle, taking hold of all who dwell within.
The Darkness–the Antithesis of Life–has been unleashed upon the kingdom, wreaking havoc upon the land and it’s people, and thrusting Vanora into the life of a Healer. Unprepared and afraid, she must leave her home and travel across the land. Through the snow capped Damik Mountains to the glittering ocean city of Ulan, Vanora is pushed beyond her physical and emotional limits, going against all that she knows about herself and the world she lives in. Her only companions are a royal Faerie named Zane and her spirit animal, Thea.
Regardless of the cost, Vanora must save the kingdom and defeat the creator of the Darkness… no matter who it turns out to be.
The princess of good trekking across the kingdom to battle the darkness of evil. This is a well tried concept and is handled wonderfully right here in a fast moving tale. If you don’t spend a lot of reading time in fantasy, you can need just the right balance of description and action to hold your interest. It’s a completely foreign world, so you need to be informed of the surroundings. The characters are often creatures, so you need plenty of detail about who and what they are. I find it easy to get bogged down in all this description in fantasy stories, but that didn’t happen with The Darkness Of Gold. Not at all. I found the characters to be intriguing and the scenery vivid, yet the story moved quickly and kept me very much interested and in anticipation of what would come next. I ended up with an impression of a richly three dimensional kingdom, with a lot to the story remaining mysterious and untold. The different kinds of communities briefly encountered were fascinating and offered adventures for the imagination well beyond the scope of this quest. You find yourself wondering what was going on there as you’re passing by. I liked that. The action scenes were quite powerful and, again, vivid. I think the romantic element was sweet and in just the right proportion with the rest of the plot. I didn’t pick the ending. That was a good twist… To an occasional fantasy reader, this was quite a good Sunday’s entertainment.
Aussie Book Reviewer 