The Last Tide: Gifted Blood Academy, Freshman Year (Ytherynia Book 1) – Maria Vermisoglou

Synopsis

🔱You’d think being a prince would make life easier. Hell, no.🔱

I am a merman, the third prince of Liquiris, and my uncontrollable powers give my brothers an excuse to bully me.

And my father? He hates the sight of me.

My escape comes unexpectedly when a letter arrives from Gifted Blood Academy.

With promises of potioneering, water binding, foreign languages and other classes suited to a prince of my status, this school seems like a paradise.

But strange incidents start plaguing the school and students disappearing.

If I don’t get to the bottom of the problem, I’ll lose the life I’ve built.

Betrayal.

Friendship.

And more…

Readers who love magic academies and mystery will love this epic adventure!

Review

Yuri is a merman, a merman prince in fact, but his father and brothers have treated him like trash all his life. So when he is given the opportunity to go to a school in Ytherynia, another realm, he is extremely happy.

He knows that they only want to get rid of him for not being able to control his powers, but the idea of ​​spending the whole year away from his family is wonderful.

At school he has to share a room with other mermen but from other places. This school receives multiple species, actually, his new best friend Eryn is a Fire Elemental.

They have interesting classes like language where they teach them languages ​​of other species, potions, even computer classes. But the school year gets complicated when students start to disappear. Interestingly, one of each species.

I absolutely loved the general idea of this book. The main character, Yuri, was quite an interesting (water) human being, and the world we get immerse in (literally) was also amazing.

My only problem was that it got hard for me to visualize some situations, mostly when we were underwater. For example, at the beginning of the book we are under the water, at Yuri’s house, but it took me a while to understand this.

Normally I don’t like too descriptive books, but in this case I felt we were missing a little and the story felt rushed at times, like some scenes were not fully connected. For example, we had Yuri in the classroom talking with a professor, and the next moment Eryn, who was not in the classroom, said something, and we find out now Yuri is with her at the cafeteria, but we had no idea we moved at all, so I felt sort of teleported from one scene to the other. It was like, things happened, but there was not a logical thread to follow.

Still it’s a very Harry Potter-esque book, with A LOT of similarities to be honest.
It’s a fast and entertaining book to read, and I feel that the base story is good. Even though we still need to understand much of it. I’ll definitely keep reading this series.

I give it 3 stars, but it would be 4 if it had better wording.

Bye bye 💕

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