Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This book was a very interesting read. I really loved the world building and background. I felt like that part of the story was really strong. I didn’t really care about the characters, some things just felt disjointed. I did see where someone called this book a “genderbent Zorro retelling”, and that made more sense, but I still feel like something was missing.

I have such mixed opinions about this book because I think there are some things that it does excellently and there are some that are quite disappointing.

The world-building ended up being my favorite aspect even though it started off pretty rough since the book throws you into the action on page 1. There’s a lot for the reader to get caught up on and the author does exposition slowly throughout the whole book. I would recommend that readers unfamiliar with Mesoamerican mythology and Mexican history read the chapter at the end of the book about history and terminology before starting the book. I didn’t realize that this chapter existed until halfway through reading the book so I think some of my early confusion with the world could have been avoided.

I did not realize that this was the first book in a series instead of a stand-alone until I had finished the book. I thought way more plot threads were going to be tied up but instead, almost everything was left very open-ended, presumably to be addressed in the sequels. While series often leave room for continuation, each installment should ideally provide a satisfying conclusion on its own. Regrettably, this book fell short of achieving that sense of closure.

The main reason for my disappointment with the ending had to do with the plot and pacing. The narrative felt meandering and disjointed, with the protagonist Leonora's actions sometimes lacking impact. The pacing felt uneven, with significant events receiving only brief attention while mundane actions were drawn out. Initially a reimagining of Zorro, the story veers off into a new direction, focusing on the prophecy and the Fifth Sun toward the latter portion.

The main antagonist for most of the book is Captain Nabarres, who is essentially a figurehead for Spanish colonization/occupation. So many pages are dedicated to Leonora talking to, fighting against, and escaping from Captain Nabarres. However, most of the interaction between Nabarres and Leonora feels perplexing and devoid of purpose. There’s this extremely confusing scene where Leonora “outsmarts” Nabarres with a political maneuver but it ends up not having any effect so I’m still not sure what the point of that scene was. The book spends so much time developing the antagonistic relationship between Leonora and Nabarres but then introduces a completely new villain in the last part of the book. This new villain lacks the build-up and emotional investment required for their ultimate defeat, especially because Leonora is almost immediately told exactly how to defeat them.

I didn’t feel like the characters were particularly compelling including the main protagonist, Leonora. Leonora’s thoughts are pretty repetitive throughout the book in order to really make sure that readers can’t possibly miss the main themes of this book. We’re also introduced to a pretty big cast of secondary characters early on and it’s difficult to distinguish between everyone. This becomes even worse when they get to Snake Mountain and are introduced to all the leaders of La Justicia.

Leonora’s secret identity, Pantera, is underdeveloped because we’re never told what she did as Pantera, before the start of the book, to become so beloved by the people. Conveniently in the first chapter, she gets shot in the leg (while failing to save someone) so she can’t do her normal Pantera activities for the first part of the book. Even so, there’s never any mention of what she previously did as Pantera and the only times she ever dons the Pantera disguise in the whole book is to taunt Captain Nabarres and try to steal back her sword. Even in the Batman movies, they show him stopping some random petty crimes apart from the whole supervillain plot.

Leonora’s motives for being the vigilante Pantera are also underdeveloped because she states that she wants Pantera to give people hope but this is never actually displayed through her actions. She spends most of the time arguing for diplomacy between La Justicia and the viceroy, her brother, which honestly makes her seem more naive than anything else. I always feel like it’s kinda weird when a fantasy book involves a fight against injustice and tyranny but does not ever question the concept of an absolute hereditary monarchy.

In essence, this book possesses commendable strengths in its world-building and initial premise, yet it falls short in weaving a compelling plot with well-developed characters and motives. While the foundation for an engaging series is present, more effort could be invested in pacing, character depth, and plot structure to create a more cohesive and fulfilling narrative.

Thank you to NetGalley and Avon and Harper Voyager for providing me with a digital copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

DNF.

I tried to get into this one since it is a genderbent Zorro retelling and that sounded pretty cool! I haven't seen a book like it before. Unfortunately the writing style was hard for me to get into and I found myself not wanting to pick it up in a span of a couple weeks. I may come back to it eventually but right now I have other books that need my attetion.

Thank you to the publisher and netgalley for a complimentary earc to review. All opinions are my own.

This book started out well and I was so excited for the cultural and mythological inspirations. Unfortunately the plot felt extremely disjointed. This book felt like it needed another round of editing for better flow. The plot just felt pieced together in odd ways.

I had such high hopes for this one – genderbent Zoro retelling with Mesoamerican mythologies! – but I straight-up hated it. Choppy, jerky prose combined with a pretty bland first-person, present-tense perspective, with a heroine right out of a bad YA novel. The dialogue stops and starts and jumps topics seemingly at random, and virtually every character is a predictable, simplistic trope – the evil stepmother, the wicked guard-captain, the wise but inscrutable magical mentor. I was torn between rolling my eyes and fighting to keep them open, because I was falling asleep despite the leaping from roof to roof and all. Blunt prose turns even moments that should be exciting into snoozefests – I was either pissed off at how stupid a scene was, confused, or incredibly bored.

I mean – no sensory description of the magic, shapeshifting or wall-leaping means none of it hits me; you might as well be telling me your grocery list. Forget telling-not-showing; this is a telling-not-feeling book, which is infinitely worse.

Luckily I’m passingly familiar with the mythology Lares is drawing on here: if you’re not, good luck, because despite the clumsy 5-page-long info-dumps absolutely none of the mythos is explained. Neither is the history; do you know who Cortés is, and his role in the slaughter of the South Americas? No? Then you might want to have Wikipedia open as you read, because so much is treated like it’s general knowledge that doesn’t need explaining, when in fact a lot of readers are going to be pretty lost.

And – of course there’s a sexy pirate. Of course there is.

A really amazing premise ruined by an execution that couldn’t do it justice.

Thank you NetGalley and Avon and Harper Voyager for providing me with an e-arc in exchange for an honest review.

3/5 stars

This book was vastly different from what I expected based on the blurb. The scenery was beautifully written and I greatly enjoyed being immersed in the landscape.

The character development was very limited. The only person who really grew was Leonora. The secondary characters had no development. Inés had so much potential and but no real growth. Ayeta had so much opportunity to be a solid secondary character but it was all untapped. His romance with Leonora was awkward and didn’t fit. Leonora didn’t communicate well with him and their whole relationship was more inferred than any action.

Lastly the transitions felt off. We were constantly jumping from past to present or present to past and it was just confusing.

Overall this was a fun adventure that just lacked a few key things. I enjoyed watching Leonora embrace who she was and own her opinions.

This book has potential but I just couldn't get into the story at all. Leonora was a very boring character; there wasn't anything about her that stuck out to me in particular and much like the other characters, she was quite forgettable. Plot wise, I honestly had a hard time absorbing everything that happened. The story didn't flow well enough for me to remember what happened, despite just finishing the book. The pacing was rather choppy. Though the later half of the book grew more interesting, I felt I was already done with it. However, some of the imagery and mythological aspects were done very well. I did enjoy the worldbuilding at times but overall, I just didn't find myself immersed enough to enjoy this book.

Wow! I’m not sure words can fully express this journey I went through with these characters. This MesoAmerican mythological romance is packed with excitement, lore and emotions. Seriously, this was a journey I went on, and it was amazing!

I really wanted to like this one, but it suffers from pacing issues. It seems like the last third of the book is just one plot twist after the other with no time to develop anything that came before. Up from 2.5 stars.
Thank you very much to Avon and Harper Voyager and NetGalley for the ARC!

DNF @63%
Cool premise and interesting world and mythology but wow did I just stop caring about anything that was happening in the book. I didn't particularly like Leonora, felt like very little vigilantism was happening when that was kind of the pitch of the book. She also mopes around a lot which was what ended up being my tipping point for giving up on the book because I was rolling my eyes so much. The plot also wasn't enough to hold me because I'm not really sure what it was. Some of it felt very random and things would happen at points where I was wondering where the book was going to go? And the end I decided that no I don't have to force myself to finish just because it's an arc and put it down

Summary of review: The strongest aspect of this book is the mythology and fantastic culture. Outside of that, it falls prey to being generic.

I'm a simple creature. Market something as having anything to do with Zorro and I will buy it immediately. While this book has its merit, I couldn't get past the flaws that made my reading experience rough.

I want to start this off with the positives: I adored having a fantasy book set in a time period that is not seen in the fantasy genre. Indigenous mythology is incredibly complex and beautiful, so it was wonderful to see a book give it the proper respect it deserves. The conquest of Mexico and how the native people were treated is horrific, and not talked about enough. Sun of Blood and Ruin did a great job of showing how Spain not only oppressed the people but also their religions. Our main character, Leonora, is half-Spanish. She is still treated poorly by her stepmother and forced into conversion, but she takes her birthright from her mother's side and does everything in her power to help her people.

From the beginning, I had a hard time immersing myself in this book. The first chapter starts off fantastically with lots of action, but after that, nothing is properly paced. It was either a lot of information in textbook form, or dialogue, and neither read well. The history and culture of Mexico in the 1550s is incredibly rich, but it wasn't being evenly distributed throughout the plot. As someone who is incredibly familiar with this era of history and Indigenous culture/mythology, I was able to skim these sections and pick up only what I needed. For those who have no clue about the Spanish conquest of Mexico, I fear the plot and political intrigue the author tried to build is going to get lost in the detached way the backstory is explained. We also have a large cast of characters introduced very early on, but none of the characters are really fleshed out. The secondary characters kept getting mixed up in my head and got in the way of a more streamlined and engaging story.

Leonora reads too much like a stereotypical heroine for me to feel any real connection to her. She is fierce, sarcastic, and a girl boss. This is all well and good, but that is all to her character. Her depth is never really explored. If we had explored past her anger and feminist icon traits, I would have been more engaged with the overall plot. After all, if you aren't able to either hate or love a character, you don't have much interest in what will happen to them.

Sadly, Leonora was as fleshed out as the characters got. Everyone else reads like a mouthpiece, there to deliver their line then fall into the background. The dialogue wasn't bad, but it was missing something. I found myself skimming the conversations, which is never a good sign because dialogue is my favorite part of the story. There was nothing engaging when she spoke to the other characters. The closest we got to a natural relationship was between Leonora and her lady maid Ines.

Sun of Blood and Ruin has woven a beautiful background based on history and mythology that has been forgotten by many. It does a great job of bringing these important pieces of culture back to the forefront of literature. As long as you are okay with subpar characters, I do think this book would be something worth reading.

Thank you to NetGalley and Avon and Harper Voyager for the advanced copy! All thoughts and opinions expressed are my own.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC in exchange for an honest review!

DNF @ 75%

First of all, I really appreciate that Lares tried to incorporate themes of colonialism and bring attention to underrepresented mythology, but sadly, this wasn’t for me.

I’m very uninvested in this book, particularly because I don’t care about Leonora. She’s not the worst heroine I’ve read, but she is annoying. She is supposedly a vigilante and super skilled, but to me she seems at best to be a whiny teenager. I also don’t care about the plot. Things will happen and I’m confused on why, and sometimes it’s obviously for plot convenience. The side characters are there but I don’t really care about any of them. I didn’t care a whit for the romance.

The writing flowed weird at times because Lares would pause the story to info-dump paragraphs of mythology, but I didn’t really retain any of the information. Overall, this is not the book for me. I didn’t hate it, I just didn’t care about it one way or another.

Admittedly, I've had a rough time with some of the Historical Fantasy I've picked up this year. But this one was so much fun to read.
Leonora was a great character, early on I wasn't entirely sure of some of her motivations. We're thrown into so much action very early on, two separate large events, then a lot of downtime where Leonora is recovering and it doesn't feel like a lot is happening because of how much action started the book. The "downtime" is filled in with what is best described as political intrigue. Leonora is not very good at it though, and just keeps making more problems for herself because she's a little bull-headed. She's better at physical fighting than she is at politics. It doesn't help that because of her mixed heritage nobody at court seems to trust her.

The romance, while it's only in the last maybe 30% of the book, lacked the chemistry for me to find it believable. I like them separately as characters, but as a pairing, it felt as if it came out of nowhere. I think Leonora needed friends and allies more than she needed a romantic partner. Everything else about their relationship could stay the same, just remove all romantic connotations and it would still work. As I say and will keep saying platonic affection is real and shouldn't be ignored.

There is a mid-way point to this book where the magic starts to take up more of the plot, and while I didn't hate it, the book also felt like it stopped being about preventing the Spanish invaders from taking more land, and about preventing or subverting this mysterious prophecy. And for me, that kind of started to lose me a little with the plot. I still enjoyed every minute of it because I love reading all kinds of mythology. And learning about the culture through these characters was very engaging and interesting, the plot got muddled for me. Even the defeat of the Spanish antagonists felt a little underwhelming because of this.

I am very interested in reading what's next for this series, I'm not sure how many books it's going to be, but I look forward to reading them regardless.

I really enjoyed this at the start, but as I continued the less I started to enjoy it. It read very young but it was supposed to be an adult fantasy. I feel like I got a bit lost in the world building and so I struggled to keep up and kind of care for the storyline. The main character also just acted very young and immature and was obviously still in the process of understanding her abilities, but this confused me since she was supposed to have been training in the forest for years. I also cared very little for the main relationship and just didn’t really see the tension or feel like they worked together enough to care. I loved the idea, I just feel like it wasn’t executed as well as it could have been.

4.5 stars

Mariely Lares does a wonderful job of of bringing Mesoamerican mythology to the main stage with her debut novel. Sun of Blood and Ruin features Leonara, a Mexica and Spanish woman, living in post-Cortez Mexico and navigating her life as the daughter of the first viceroy of New Spain by day. By night, she is Pantera, a masked vigilante sorceress who fights to keep the Mexica safe from the Spanish that try to kill and exploit them. As the story progresses, we dive deeper into the story we are introduced to a variety of amazing characters and exciting adventures as Pantera and La Justicia battle the Spanish for the safety of their people.

Sun of Blood and Ruin does an amazing job of pulling you into the story. The world building was top tier and the magic system, Nagualism, is amazingly unique. Nagualism is based on Mesoamerican folk lore and the animal counterparts to those with the abilities is a breath of fresh air from the typical powers seen in fantasy books today. The characters were wonderfully complex and I can't wait to see where future books take us.

Review has been posted on GoodReads and will be posted on Instagram in the next few days.

This is a story rich in folklore and mythology. A gender-swapped retelling of Zoro that had all the action to back that up.

Although I feel like this story didn't have a perfect flow to it, I still enjoyed it. I felt more dazzled by the historical aspects of this book and less so by the characters.

Overall, this was a really interesting and entertaining read.

Thank you, Netgalley and Publisher, for this Arc!

The cover of this book is amazing and really drew me. I'm hoping that this book will be less confusing once it's been edited again. It's very hard to read and the sentences are broken up in a way that makes it difficult to read. I want to continue with this book because the setting sounds awesome but I don't know if I can get passed the broken English and the choppy writing.

This beautiful improvisation on Zorro, suffused with mesoamerican history, has a lot going for it - unique world-building, gorgeous mythology, and powerful messages about colonization. Lares' descriptions are lush and sensate, I especially found myself salivating over her descriptions of food. However, I just could not connect with the characters in the slightest. I felt profoundly disconnected from their inner lives and often had trouble separating the minor characters in my mind. Lenora felt brash and impulsive and younger than her age, although she does grow throughout the novel. To me, she falls squarely into the category of sassy, badass protagonists whose sharp words and beautiful face are only a thin veil for the weakness of their development overall.

Thank you Netgalley, author, and the publishers for allowing me the opportunity to read this e-arc.

Interesting twist on Zorro with a female main character but really missed the mark. The book was very slow and provided little backstory and explanation to those not familiar with the cultural elements of the book. A real missed opportunity.