I have received this ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

It took me a while to get into Anahera. If I'm being honest here, it was kind of hard to keep up with the dialogue and constant POV jumping. At times, I had no idea whose perspective I was reading from because they switched so often within the same chapter. I had to backtrack a lot to see what I missed and who was in the scene to begin with, just for it to make sense.

Then there's the worldbuilding, which I would've liked more of. Sure, if she went somewhere, we might see something new. On top of that, we have the romance. I'm not sure if I truly see her with this guy that she chose because I liked the banter between her and the captain a bit more. Between the smell of cardamom and snow, I could see how it was hard to pick a specific scent, but why not enjoy a mixture of both?

Besides those two things, I also have a lot of questions when it comes to the magic within this world. I feel like things could've been explained a bit more or better in my eyes. Why do they continue to test her? Why does she smell certain smells when they are using magic? Why do I get the feeling that these offerings happen way more often than we originally thought or were told? This last question is just living rent-free in the back of my mind based on the few conversations that happened with a certain someone.

With all these unanswered questions floating around in my mind, I will most likely dive into the next book in this series. Especially with those comments casually made within the last chapter. Those alone will forever keep me wanting to ship Isabella with Eric. In the end, I just want answers and for things to be a bit quicker, pace-wise.

Isabella is a young traveler from New Zealand who has just settled in the Shetlands, when she finds herself pulled into another world through a portal that opens on Midsummer's Day.

The world building and setting the scene for the characters took a while but I believe the author managed to do it well. I did struggle at first getting into the book and as a fellow Scot it was a bit of a struggle with the Shetland accent ( I felt it was a little over-pronounced) But overall was a nice quick read once I got into it. I enjoyed the multi-pov as I feel you get to know the characters better.

Overall great story and lovely to get a bit of a Scottish representation. Definitely worth the read and would recommend it.

Bit of a miss for me. I liked the idea of scent magic but it wasn't quite as developed as much. The love interest was definitely not for me

Unique areas of plot but overall quite slow and repetitive. This missed the mark for me unfortunately.

Unfortunately this book was not for me, it was a bit slower than I would like and it just didn't hold my attention. I am sure other people will love it!

Thank you NetGalley and publishers for this ebook but it just wasnt for me. There were some small parts that I had enjoyed but ended up dnf-ing 40% in. I could not relate to Isabella. And from what I did read had alot of repetition. I stopped reading this and tried to pick it back up. It just didn't help, sadly.

On Midsummer's Eve, Isabella Mackay finds herself pulled through the Anahera Gate into the archipelago of Hjaltland, a world of scented magic, chaotic storms and competing goddesses. Unable to understand the language, ignorant of its cultures and completely devoid of magic, she struggles to find her own path to freedom and safety. This might be a little easier if she wasn't shackled to the sardonic Captain Bannerman upon arrival and hauled over a mountain. He has a job to do, and she is determined to stop him from doing it. But some fates cannot be avoided, and when they reach the great Citadel, Isabella is faced with an impossible choice: accept their bargain, or be thrown into the slave pits of Hamnavoe. Whether it is flying waka over storm-haunted mountains, riding giant, psychic cats across the Citadel rooftops or feeding tidbits to tiny, alcoholic dragons, she is determined to survive, to forge new alliances and thwart her oppressors. Will Isabella make her way through it, back to our world? And will she even want to?

Words cannot describe how much I enjoyed this book! Full of creativity, imagination, magic, tension, romance, intriguing characters, enigmatic settings and a page-turning plot Anahera has quickly earned a place as of one of my favourite fantasy novels EVER!!!!

Max has created a world in Hjatland that I just want to live in and her protagonist Isabella is a fantastic, feisty and unconventional female who I admire and champion throughout the twists and turns of her ordeals and adventures in this distant land.

I am not normally not a fan of romance in but the way that Max delivers the storyline of the budding relationship between Isabella and Bryant and the suspense of its outcome kept me reading into the early hours of the morning. Max left Isabella’s story unfinished so I can’t wait until the next instalment so I can return to Hjatland and see what Max has in store next for Isabella.

Thank you NetGalley for providing an ARC in return for my honest review.

There were things I both liked and disliked with this story.

Starting with the good:
The story took a little for me to get into but I did enjoy it overall, I enjoyed a lot of unique aspects to the storyline where our main character Isabella and a group of humans find themselves being transported to an alternate dimension and facing the choice of marrying a member of the ruling class or being sold to the highest bidder as a slave.
The worldbuilding was unique and I was really interested in the many different species mentioned in the story.
This story has a slooooooow burn romance, no insta-love here!


And now for my dislikes:
I didn't enjoy changing between different characters perspectives so much, if it was a different perspective in a new chapter that would be fine but I did get confused when we would change mid-paragraph. It made it difficult to always work out what I was meant to be reading.
I prefer when we are shown things through actions/scenes within a story rather than being told, and with this story we are told a lot rather than shown.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for an advanced copy in exchange for my honest review!

Ended up putting it on the DNF list at 21 percent. I just...struggled trying to get through this one. The third-person writing style put me off, mostly because it made the storytelling feel almost stilted. It just made it harder to understand what was going on most of the time. I'd have to go back and reread passages to try and recenter myself because I keep getting confused about who was speaking. The jumps between different characters' mental dialogue were tiring because I was constantly getting confused about who exactly was thinking what. The plot that I managed to drag myself through has a lot of "yikes" moments. Including the main character almost getting sexually assaulted right at the beginning of the book, constantly describing POC character with food adjectives, and other things. Minor spoilers, but Bannerman's first impression of Isabella, directly after getting kicked in the nuts by her is, "She is not unpleasant to look at - passable breast and an agreeably fertile curve to her hips, although her attitude is decidedly feral." Like, seriously my guy? You just injected a mysterious substance into her, and from her point of view, you're holding her down just like the guy who almost sexually assaulted her earlier. But you still have a moment to stop and ogle her? Near the 20 percent mark, there's a part of a scene that baffled me. “She has laughed with the man, struggled with him, made some kind of connection.” Except...she didn’t… I don’t feel any connection between our two main characters in the slightest. Just because they were nice to each other during a meal or two does not make them “connected”. The struggle of him trying to keep her alive wasn’t out of some desire to keep her safe, he literally only did it because it was his job. His job is to protect an Anahera and that’s what he did. Nothing more, nothing less. Also, he’s treated her the same most people would treat an acquaintance. The book is also trying its damndest to pair Bannerman and Isabella off together. I assume they get into a romantic relationship later in the book, but in the first part, it just feels forced. One minor side thing that bothered me is the accents of the Shetland villagers in the very beginning. Shetland is an island off the coast of Scotland, so my assumption is that they would have a similar accent to the Scottish. Yet, when I first read the villager's accents, they were written in a way that I thought they were Jamaican until the book clearly stated they were in Shetland. Also, if the portals opened around the world, what was the point of Isabella coming to Shetland instead of going through a portal in New Zealand where she is from? She even meets someone who came through a New Zealand portal! Everyone being described with certain scents slightly annoyed me at first, but I remembered the plot description does say "a world of scented magic". (Side note, I used to handcraft custom perfume oils for a job, so I know my way around scent blending. Cardamom and cigar smoke does NOT smell good together. It smells like spicy musky dust and makes you want to sneeze. I've made that exact blend before, so I know!) The Maori culture references in the book were cool to see. You rarely ever see Maori culture used in fantasy novels, so it was a nice change from the usually referenced cultures. I will give the book that. I really didn't like Anahera. Maybe if it wasn't written in the third person style, it would be a little easier to digest. But as it stands, it's going to be staying on my DNF shelf permanately.

I had to DNF this book unfortunately around the 20% mark. The character development lacked significantly even 20% in. I’m huge on two things - character development or world building. So if either or both of those things are lacking it’s difficult for me to remain engaged. Especially when it concerns the FMC.

I didn’t really ‘get’ this book, the concept was really good, I was excited to read it but it did take quite a while for me to get into it. When I finally did get into it I think I expected more from it and then all of a sudden it just seemed to end? I was a bit confused overall.

ANAHERA was a little hard to get into sometimes, but it was an overall unique concept and was interesting. It was a nice reading experience despite finding a few parts to be extremely slow.

Another book I had mixed feelings about! It took me a while to get into this and I’m talking over 50% in. The concept of the book is interesting. Main character Isabella is pulled through a ‘gate’ into another world. As a main character she’s ‘okay’. She’s pretty inconsistent - she has random moments of rebellion and at other times is really passive and docile.

My main gripe with the book was the POV that it’s written in. I always prefer books written in first person and not only was this third person but it also jumped around from person to person within the same page. One minute I’m following the main character Isabella and her thoughts and feelings and in the next I’m reading the thoughts and feelings of the barmaid who is observing Isabella. It was just really jarring and made me feel distant. It also meant that there wasn’t really any mystery, I knew what each characters intentions were. However this did get better as the book progressed and began focussing more on Isabella.

When I did finally start to get into this book…it ended. I think it ended quite abruptly. It wasn’t a cliffhanger, it seemed to just sort of end mid scene and I was left feeling really unsatisfied! I would be interested in reading the second book because this one did get more focussed towards the end.

The premise of this book was intriguing, and that’s why I originally read it. It did take a while for me to get into it. The writing style wasn’t my favorite. It felt like it was all over the place at times.

I tried to get into this book. I really did. The synopsis sounded absolutely fascinating when I requested it, but the book itself let me down. I made it about 30% in before I DNF'd out of sheer boredom. I couldn't connect to the protagonist and the characters were utterly forgettable. The worldbuilding in this novel is actually quite interesting, but when the characters feel as flat as they do, this aspect ultimately wasn't enough to keep my attention. The author had an incredible basis for this story: she just didn't deliver.

Wow what a unique fantasy read! The fantasy world the main character Isabella ends up in feels different than most I have read about before. I will say I would’ve loved a bit more world-building type descriptions, I was definitely confused by some of the different species/animals etc, but it got a bit easier to pick up on as I went along. I would love to give this a re-read and pay a bit closer attention to help build the world in my head more. I wanted a bit more understanding of Isabella and who she is and her past, but I still found her ultimately likable and overall a good character. At first I was annoyed by a bit of a bait and switch love interest type situation but got over it quickly. The cliff hanger though! It definitely gets me wanting to read the next in the series to see how it plays out!

Let's start with the things I didn't like and end on a positive note.
I genuinely like when Maori culture is referenced, but in this case it felt weird to have the MC being from Aotearoa but portalled in Shetland and then the people she comes across use the same references and words. Why not portal her from New Zealand? That would have made more sense to me. The injection with the tiny bugs to understand and read local language? Too convenient. I thought there could've been a better way to handle this or just make them use the same language in the first place. Altogether the references were all over the place, saris from India, Fish Amok from Cambodia, Norse mythology and Maori culture mixed with fantasy. It was just too much and I would've preferred if the author made up her own culture, food and words for this fantasy book.

What I absolutely hated were smell references on EVERY single page and I almost dnfed the book because of that.
Isabella the MC has no ambition or goal in mind, which bothered me. The dialogue and jumping between POV thoughts could've been done better, but all being said, I would read the next book, because there is potential.

Thank you Netgalley for providing me with an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

Full Disclaimer: I got a free ARC of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

The opening chapter of this book gave me Outlander vibes, but this book is better. There aren't side tangents that pad the word count, blatant Homophobia, or rape threats every other chapter, or the male protagonist beating his supposedly beloved wife like there are in Outlander.

I loved the world building. The capital, the history, the different species, etc. They all appear to be just the tip of the iceberg and I can't wait to see a bit more below the surface of said iceberg in subsequent books.

I appreciated how Isabella and Bryant's relationship is growing at a realistic pace. I also enjoyed the humour such as when one character says "Break of second bloody fast." In a message.) IYKYK.

I can't wait for subsequent books to see how Vianne Max explores the Anahera being immune to magic, and the hinted at fight between Bryant and The First Mother, as well as the humorous banter between Isabella, Bryant, and Eric.

I had a lot of trouble getting into this book - at first, I didn't understand why, but I think it might be because it's written in 3rd person, present tense. I have noticed this often feels strange to me. I tried to stick through it, but admit I didn't manage to finish the novel. I love portal fantasy, so I had high expectations, but my mind just kept wandering off despite interesting things happening. It's really a case of the writing style not talking to me personally.

I love magic portal books so had high hopes for Anahera. But it didn’t quite deliver the way I hoped.

The beginning put me off completely when it was written in a local dialect, which made understanding what characters were saying challenging. Thankfully, that didn’t continue throughout the book, but it didn’t serve to draw me straight in.

Isabella as the main character was hard to get a grip on. You never really feel like you know her as a person. She’s supposed to be able to deal with situations and control her negative emotions, but it just left her seeming shallow. She either didn’t react to a situation at all, or flew off the handle and two paragraphs later was back to like nothing happened. There didn’t feel any true depth to her.

There are multiple other characters whose point of view we experience. But the narrator could switch from paragraph to paragraph, which often left my head spinning about who we were following. It also meant there was a lot of exposition as we didn’t have to read into any situation, but got a snapshot into how other characters were feeling then returned to the main characters.

It was hard to piece how some of the plot was going to come together. The beginning felt rushed, and the start of what could have been an interesting relationship became twisted then cut short, only to re-emerge right at the end in a confusing twist of deception, even if I never quite figured out who was deceiving who.

There were parts of the plot that were just too convenient. Isabella gets pulled through a magic portal, and coincidentally so does her best friend who was on the other side of the world? It felt cliche and a convenient crutch for Isabella to lean on, especially when the two girls then chose best friends to marry.

I wanted more emotion from this book. I wanted there to be consequences from being sucked into a new world rather than everything just taken in its stride. Isabella needed to feel more than either rage or placidity. I also would have benefitted from getting to know more about this new world other than most of the population being classed as obnoxious.

However, despite my misgivings, I did find that I got caught up in the second half of the book. While that didn’t last all the way to the end, I found it an easy and relaxing read once it settled into a rhythm and was happy to curl up with it for an hour or so.

This book has potentially. There’s a nugget in there that works; a premise that could be really interesting. It just needs a little more clarity and tightening up in places to allow the reader to become immersed in the characters and the world.

If you’re looking for a bit of escapism and not taking anything too seriously, then it’s a quick and easy read you might enjoy.