Hi there,

I hope you’re all having a great weekend. Last week, I finished Kay Kenyon‘s A Thousand Perfect Things (thanks again to Premier Digital Publishing for the ARC). So here’s my review. Enjoy. 🙂

Summary quoted from Kay Kenyon¹:

In an alternate 19th century, there are two warring continents on an reimagined earth: the scientific Anglica (England) and magical Bharata (India). Emboldened by her grandfather’s final whispered secret of a magical lotus, Tori Harding, a young Victorian woman and aspiring botanist, must journey to Bharata, with its magics, intrigues and ghosts, to claim her fate. There she will face a choice between two suitors and two irreconcilable realms.

My Thoughts:

A Thousand Perfect Things is set in the 19th century on two fictional continents called Anglica and Bharata. I really enjoyed Kay Kenyon’s descriptions of the setting, especially of exotic Bharata. She managed to make me feel enchanted by this distant place. It seemed to me that her descriptions got more vivid in the last third of the book.

As to the characters, this novel mainly focuses on Tori Harding, a young woman who unlike other women her age is not interested in marriage, but wants to become a botanist. I had no problems empathizing with Tori. I also enjoyed the variety of other characters in A Thousand Perfect Things, yet there were no big surprises.

I really enjoyed this special story Ms. Kenyon created. It has history, magic and far off places. All the things I like. Still, the story had its lengths and that was the downside of this book. I read it on my Kindle, so I can’t say how many pages the book really had. But it felt like 600 and it shouldn’t have. Still, I strongly recommend to finish A Thousand Perfect Things. This book feels magical!

(actually 3.5 beans)

¹ http://www.kaykenyon.com/novels/