The blurb convinced me to read the book - Cinder meets Sailor Moon sounded awesome. Overall I did find the pacing to be a bit slow and the characters to be a little immature. The “good looking giggles” and the character not understanding the “dirty” things got a bit old. I liked the characters interactions with one another and I did feel like the world building was excellent. Overall I found the book to be okay but ultimately I don’t think I was the target audience. If you enjoy younger anime I think it would definitely be a book you’d like.

I really loved this. It's not as lushly atmospheric as Wintersong and has more worldbuilding substance. It actually really strongly reminds me of Elizabeth Lim's style of writing, so if you enjoyed Spin the Dawn or Six Crimson Cranes you'll be bound to like this.

I really liked the characters and found their motivations and actions pretty consistently believable. The tone struck a nice balance a dark tale of missing magicians and monsters and a cheerful feel-good love story with a found family thrown in.

One of my favorite things was the parallels Jae-Jones draws between magicians in this world and queer people in ours. There are queer characters in this world, and there isn't a big deal made about them. But what's really interesting is that magic is taboo and gets people shunned and prosecuted and even executed. The main character even "comes out" as a magician at one point to her sister (using those exact words) and it's a very 'coming out' sort of moment.

But my absolutely favorite thing was the inclusion of the Bangtan Brothers and how well Jae-Jones integrated BTS into her plot, even including some of their songs and well-known phrases. As an ARMY, it was a delightful surprise and I loved discovering all the easter eggs.

The story wrapped up well but left enough loose ends that I look forward to the next one.

The audiobook narrator did a great job and I really enjoyed her rendition of the characters and the story. She brought it to life and made it feel more real.

*Thanks to NetGalley, Wednesday Books, and Macmillan Audio for providing an early copy and early audio copy for review.

First off the cover is gorgeous!!! The narrator did a beautiful job bringing the story to life. I enjoyed their take on different characters and I was never confused on who was speaking. The story inside is just as beautiful. I loved the play/retelling of Cinderella but that not being the main plot points. There is so much more to this story than just another retelling. The magic system is beautifully done. I enjoyed the different cultural aspects of the book. I’m not well versed in Korean folklore to know how much came from it, but I didn’t need to be because the story flowed so well that you never felt lost in a new world.

Zhara is such an amazing character and I love when you get to watch them grow throughout the story. The cast around her is just as deep and colorful. I absolutely love the War Lords granddaughter. I hope she gets her own story line as this series progresses!

I alternated between the audio and digital versions of this book, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The unique magic system captivated me and I really liked the growth of Zhara's character. The romance was incredibly cute, and Han's character was particularly appealing. Overall, it was a good book, although it did feel a bit slow-paced for my taste. I would rate it 3.5 out of 5.

Thank you to Wednesday Books and Netgalley for this advance audio arc!

3.5/5 stars

Thank you to Netgalley, Wednesday books and Macmillan audio for both the e-arc and alc.

I had slightly high expectations for this book due to it being compared to lunar chronicles which is one of my favorite series of all time. I would say it was a pretty solid book but not perfect. I felt like it did drag in some parts and was overall not fast paced which I do prefer for my books.

Zhara is a magician in a world where having magic is illegal and punished by death. Jin Zhara is stuck serving her stepmother's every whim no matter how cruel to help protect her blind stepsister all while keeping her magic under control. When magical monsters start to reappear she has to team up with the Guardians of Dawn to save her land.

I liked most of the characters in the book, especially Yuli who I hope to see more in another book in the series. I liked the magic system but I did wish for a little more into that. Overall it was decent. I just still have questions on how it all works.

For my audiobook arc I did really like the narrator and it kept me engaged the whole time.

I do recommend this book. It does read a bit younger for YA than I personally prefer but that’s not a bad thing just not for me.

I absolutely loved this book. It's very much a fairy tale wrapped in historical paper, dunked in asian culture. It's delicious. I loved the mc and she was both likable because she was clever and because she was naive, in the way you WANT a mc to be. She expects better from people than they give her and gives people credit who don't deserve it, refusing to condemn the person who says they love her in the face of utter cruelty.

Our heroine is a loving sister who is almost giving to the point where there is nothing left of her. She has very little self outside of her devotion to her sister, but throughout the story she blossoms and becomes accepting of herself, her strength (which at the beginning is completely untapped) and her weaknesses. She also develops a relationship with some disguised castle denizens and her community in a way she is lacking painfully at the beginning.

The narrator is lovely and does a stellar job, filling this role perfectly in my opinion and doing an excellent job of slipping from character to character. I would absolutely pick up another audiobook with her as my guide.

Thank you NetGalley and Macmillan audio for the advanced review copy of this book, the review itself is completely my own.

I’m not sure where the negative reviews for this are coming from (and everyone is entitled to their own opinion honestly) because I loved this book. I listened to it as an audiobook and it had the same hilarious themes as an anime would. It was funny and immature yes but serious at times as well. I couldn’t wait to get to the end to figure out if this was a standalone or if this would continue as a series. I was so happy to find out the ending is left open with potential for a sequel. Because I want to come back to Zhara and Han and most importantly Xu (because they were one of my favorite characters)

Zhara wasn’t a strong female protagonist for a lot of the book. She was weakened by her self image and she desire to be a “good girl”. This did get annoying but I understand that when you’re the victim of a narcissist you start to feel a certain way about yourself and life. It also took way too long for Zhara to figure things out and that was frustrating as a reader in general.

But overall I loved it. I’m glad that I am getting the illumicrate edition now that I’ve read the book and loved it. It’ll become a treasured part of my collection and I can’t wait for the next book.

This book had me at Sailor Moon and its stunning cover, but fell short. If you are a fan of YA fantasy and don’t mind juvenile humor, I can see you really enjoying this book. Unfortunately for me, that wasn’t the case.

That being said, the world building was absolutely the strongest aspect and the plot had potential. It makes me curious about the next book in the series and how it can be built upon. However, the writing, humor and pacing took me out of the story. This is definitely on the younger side of YA, having a very juvenile sense of humor. While this is not necessarily a bad thing, I found it to be distracting.

**Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC. This review is my opinion**

I am a sucker for anything similar to "Sailor Moon". This book definitely has an awesome magic system, and a great mythology, but something was...missing. The main character, Zhara, is interesting, but she didn't jump off the page like I thought she was. I started to lose interest by the end, but I pushed on because this author created the mystical "Wintersong". I wasn't a fan of "Shadowsong", so I wanted to give the author another chance with this book.

I hate being on the fence!

⭐️ 3.75 / 5
I was really excited about this book with the comparisons to Sailor Moon and Cinder - two series I absolutely have adored. And that cover! It is absolutely stunning.

The love story here was very sweet and wholesome and I really enjoyed the supporting cast of characters. It has the nostalgic feeling of an old fairytale with the addition of magic! And the audiobook narrator was a very good fit.

I will say, however, that this felt a bit too young for me. I enjoyed the story overall, but it felt a little too predictable and problems were solved almost too easily for the main characters. And there were certain quirks (the good looking giggles…) that I just couldn’t get into. And I wish we’d had a bit more of a look into the magic system, so I’m hoping that’s coming in the future! That being said, I would pick up the second book when it comes out and look forward to reading it.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for an advanced copy of the audiobook in exchange for my honest review.

This is such a fun read. A great adventure. It has all of the tropes and vibes I like. Strong women. Hidden royalty. Monsters. Magic. Cannot recommend enough

Really enjoyed the audiobook! I think I would not have had such an easy time to understand the book if I had read the physical book. The pronunciations really helped!
Overall the book was very enjoyable and the magic was fun! I think some of the understanding of magic could have been better explained for the reader to grasp how it works and why Zhara’s magic is different. I thought the book was well planned though and the characters were well developed. The representation was also great!!

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the approval of this E ARC!

Going into reading Zhara I had high hopes and expectations with the Sailor Moon and Cinder tags attached to the summary.

For the most part, my expectations were met. Guardians Of Dawn: Zhara was a sweeping wonderful fantasy read and by the end I became quite attached to the many colourful and diverse characters.

The lore and history was handled pretty well, I did get lost in a few places but just needed to re read some parts or look back at previous chapters to better understand what was and had happened.
Sometimes things got a bit confusing though. But my main complaint was some plot points and reveals fell kind of flat on landing or forgotten entirely towards the end. There was some pacing and blanks towards the end I would have liked to have been fleshed out a bit better.

I really appreciated and support the authors choice for characters referred as ungendered they/them until such character gender themselves, it’s quite wonderful to see in a book. And the support to queer and diverse characters was such *chefs kiss*.

I loved loved loved the Ever After vibes I got towards the end (when you read it you’ll notice if you are a fan!) It made me smile and hopefully I’m not the only one who noticed it!

Overall I loved my time with Zhara, Han and co. In Zanhei and I eagerly await the sequel.

This book really didn't grip me the way I hoped. The main character was a struggle to read, shes "quirky" in a way that shoves it down the readers throat and the prince in "hiding" was not even subtle.

The LGBTQ and Disability rep was very poorly done, to the point that it felt borderline offensive on its own. If I was understanding correctly, the nonbinary gets misgendered in the text.

I was very optimistic going into this book but it was a huge let down.

DNF at 70%

Oh my. Where do I start. *cries in frustrated disappointment*

I tried incredibly very hard to like this. I traded for the physical arc and was both gifted the audiobook and eARC by Netgalley, Macmillan Audio, St. Martin's Press, and Wednesday Books in exchange for an honest review. Unfortunately, I spent the weeks I was flip-flopping between the three different media forcing myself to enjoy while dreading continuing through the story. And now writing this I’m still anxious about re-living the time spent with this book.

Let’s start with the good bits and he reasons why I didn’t rate it a 1 star – the cover? Absolutely STUNNING. So gorgeous and I absolutely cannot wait to see what the special editions for this book looks like because I know it’s going to be even more beautiful.

Another great thing about this book is the diversity in the representation. It’s Asian, there’s disability rep, and I instantly decide to read any book with a queernorm world.

However, those are the only bits that I enjoyed about the book. It reads so forcibly young as if it was written for middle grade age but in such a condescending way. I read quite a bit of middle grade and this felt like a parody of that. Interspersed in between al the juvenile text were irreverent and dirty jokes that felt out of place and completely irrelevant to the story line. I don’t see how a young child being joked about as obsessed with porn is important to the narrative. How jokes about the lack of intelligence of characters and the blindness of other characters are important to the story?

As for the audiobook, the narrator was objectively good but adding to my observation that I felt as if I was reading a train wreck in slow-motion, the narrator was MEOWING in my ear constantly. And not as a sound effect. She would meow out the cat’s noises when the text would say “meow” and that honestly was really disturbing.

The characters themselves felt as if they were intentionally part of the TDTL trope with how immature and intentionally obstinate they were portrayed to be. They never seemed to see what was right in front of their faces as the plot went on and they were so unserious all the time and for what? Someone gets tortured? OK, lets giggle about it.

For the writing, it was extremely repetitive, and the pace meandered over and over in the same extremely small circle. The most beautiful part of this book was the author’s note at the start. I wish I stopped there.

In the end, I really couldn’t take it and just decided to DNF at 70%. This was the biggest chore to read and unfortunately my biggest disappointment of the year next to Martha Well’s Witch King. It put me in the biggest reading slump of year so far and I really wish I didn’t try as hard as I did to love it.

This one started out super strong! I was so invested for a while. The end unfortunately wasn't what I wished for it. I do think it's worth checking out though and I'lI definitely be reading the next book! The main characters are quite immature unfortunately; which I am not sure if the author was trying to blend like anime humour into this, but I do think the comparison to Sailor Moon is accurate. The FMC gets "Good Looking Giggles" where she cannot help but laugh when there's a beautiful person in her vacinity. Also the MMC has a few jokes about his innocence that get old very quickly. These make it feel a bit more juvenile than most YA books I read but I mean, I don't think it harmed the story too much. The love story is a bit cheesy at times but I didn't mind it too much - it was cute. I REALLY liked the world, magic, and the system set up in this. It is very interesting and I hope it gets fleshed out more in future books. I did find it be info dumpy and I had to review parts because it was a lot of information. It did lose me at about 60% as there's a (lesser used) trope I'm not too sure about, but I do think it was an acceptable explanation of events. The other thing was there is a boy band introduced near the end that is very clearly BTS which I just found out of place to be honest. Overall, I know I had a lot of negatives, but I still enjoyed it for what it is and I'm looking forward to where Jin Zhara and Han go next! Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for an advanced copy in exchange for my honest review.

Is this suppose to be middle grade? I'm sorry. I really, really wanted to like this book but after 20% I couldn't do it anymore. I know being a reviewer means to finish the book before giving a full review, So I will only review the 20% I heard, One of my bookish pet peeves is when I hear or read the same phrase, same words of something over and over again. There's books that will use the same analogies, or same metaphors or just plain trying to make a point of something repeatedly. And when I say repeatedly I mean multiple times in the same chapter, same couple of pages or same page. Like I get it. Is there no other way to describe something or get your point across? When something is this repetitive it makes me wonder if its meant for a younger audience, because this book, unfortunately for me had very little world building. At 20% I should know what the characters objective is or their struggle or what in the world the book is suppose to be about. But all I got was that the main character loved a certain book, they are in a school or something to learn magic and that's it. The story was going nowhere. It was all conversation with no direction. Literally all I remember from it is the maiden he loves is death or something like that because I'm pretty sure I heard that title over 20 times in the first 5 chapters. I may just be impatient with my audiobooks this week but it just was not my kind of fantasy book I guess. My apologies to the author.

Formally, I think I’ve settled on a 2.75 as a rating. It was cute and it was a fun adventure, but I wasn’t very compelled to keep picking the story back up. I normally finish an audiobook in the span of a week, max, but this one took me almost twice that simply because I wasn't very interested - which was very disappointing to me.

Nonetheless, thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with this ALC!

Thank you NetGalley and MacMillan Audio for the opportunity to read this book, in exchange for my honest review.

The first thing that drew me in to this book was the cover. Then, I read the synopsis, saw "Cinder", and I was sold.

Guardians of Dawn: Zhara, is a duel POV book that follows Zhara and Han. In a place where magic is punishable by death, Zhara has lived her whole life trying to hide hers. When she isn't taking care of her drunken step mother, and little sister, she works at the local apothecary and reads romance novels. Han, is a prince who is doing whatever he can to protect his little brother. After a chance meeting, Han and Zhara, along with the help of some unlikely friends, band together to do what they can to save the world.

This book was cute. I liked the characters and their banter. While I wouldn't necessarily compare Zhara to Cinder, it was an Asian Cinderella retelling, so it did do as promised. I also thought the writing flowed well, and was well paced.

While I liked the banter, the writing did seem a little juvenile to me. If you went into this book, not knowing that it was a YA book, then you would think it was Middle Grade. The mannerisms of the characters, and how they talk was more middle school than a group of seventeen year olds.

All in all, I give this book 3 stars and I will continue the series when the next book become available.

This book was magical.

Zhara has magic. Magic is outlawed in her kingdom, you can even be disappeared for having it, no matter whether that magic is healing or destruction. She meets a young boy in a bookstore and finds out his brother also has magic.

Can they find the Guardians of Dawn and save the ones they love?