I think it says a lot about how good Asunder that I couldn't stop reading it. I am not good with horror or creeping tension at all, and Asunder crosses the line from dark into horror quite often; some of it gory, some of it really intense, demonic, eldritch scenes centered around very alien and very powerful side characters, as well as just a never-ending ratcheting of a ticking timer that starts from early on and keeps a lingering growing pressure on the story and the characters. The world is so imaginative; there are really cool and vivid ideas sprinkled throughout that I would occasionally stop to gush to people about, an interweaving of a complex magical system with every day needs that expresses itself in really neat ways. The story also gives glimpses of nation state level tensions, religions, and various big fishes in little ponds that serve to flavor the world further. 

 

 It’s not just world and setting that’s great; what usually keeps me reading is a strong connection to a main character, and Asunder did that really well. Main perspective character Karys is complex and competent and long suffering, the type of character that has obvious vulnerabilities under a thin layer of armor in a world that demands survive or die; and while she could probably fit in neatly into certain dark fantasy main character archetypes, she does come across very believably realistic to me. The other prominent characters Ferain, Winola and Haeki are all charming and complex in their own and very different ways, and the way they connect, fight, have tension or have tender moments with, had good emotional weight; nobody felt undersold or two dimensional, and they all (especially Karys) kept me completely emotionally engaged in the whole story. 

 

If I wanted to find things to criticize, I could probably find plenty. The way Kerstin Hall piled on the tension and kept me hooked in Karys’s journey definitely served to make me more forgiving of some of the flaws, like how the characters were sometimes moving from disconnected set piece to set piece; you basically get dripfed names of different countries and settings here and there without much chance of lining them up in any way. Or how much understanding what was going on at any moment often hinged heavily on contextual clues, like what exactly an “awrig” is. I’m fed enough context that I know an "awrig" is a magical vehicle of some sort, but I had to take a moment to figure it out after the word is unceremoniously dropped into a sentence. Stuff like that happened often. I felt fine with this and never had any difficulty, but there’s a level of surprising efficiency to the whole book, down to plopping you straight into the insanity from the first chapter. This probably isn’t a book for everyone if you don't care for the style. It also ends a bit abruptly, although nothing about the ending felt too far out of left field; it is definitely deserving of a sequel though.

I really think this book is worth a try, and Kerstin Hall came out of nowhere to be an author I'm keeping an eye on. After that cliffhanger I anxiously waiting for a sequel (please write one), and I'll probably check out her other books too.