Cobweb Bride

#1 in Cobweb Bride Trilogy series

by Vera Nazarian

Age: Adult
Genre: Historical Fantasy

Format: Ebook, 318 pages
Published On: June 22, 2013
Publisher: Leda (imprint of Norilana Books)
Source: NetGalley

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First Sentence: He came to them in the heart of winter, asking for his Cobweb Bride.

Summary

Many are called... She alone can save the world and become Death's bride.

COBWEB BRIDE (Cobweb Bride Trilogy, Book One) is a history-flavored fantasy novel with romantic elements of the Persephone myth, about Death's ultimatum to the world.

What if you killed someone and then fell in love with them?

In an alternate Renaissance world, somewhere in an imaginary "pocket" of Europe called the Kingdom of Lethe, Death comes, in the form of a grim Spaniard, to claim his Bride. Until she is found, in a single time-stopping moment all dying stops. There is no relief for the mortally wounded and the terminally ill....

Covered in white cobwebs of a thousand snow spiders she lies in the darkness... Her skin is cold as snow... Her eyes, frozen... Her gaze, fiercely alive...

While kings and emperors send expeditions to search for a suitable Bride for Death, armies of the undead wage an endless war... A black knight roams the forest at the command of his undead father... Spies and political treacheries abound at the imperial Silver Court.... Murdered lovers find themselves locked in the realm of the living...

Look closer--through the cobweb filaments of her hair and along each strand shine stars...

And one small village girl, Percy--an unwanted, ungainly middle daughter--is faced with the responsibility of granting her dying grandmother the desperate release she needs.

As a result, Percy joins the crowds of other young women of the land in a desperate quest to Death's own mysterious holding in the deepest forests of the North...

And everyone is trying to stop her.

~ taken from Amazon

My Thoughts

Cobweb Bride with theme about Death looking for a bride and the fact that main heroine is called Persephone fooled me into thinking it will be a retelling of a famous greek myth about Persephone and Hades. But Vera Nazarian didn't do this, instead she created a different and completely unique story.

Set in an imaginary European country, Cobweb Bride takes place during Renaissance, one of my favorite historical periods. There will be glittering courts and their intrigues, intricate wigs and fashion, but also we will get a glimpse of how the poor lived in this time, because the heroes of Cobweb Bride are from different social groups.

As I already said, Cobweb Bride is about a peculiar subject. Death appears and declares that there will be no more dying until his cobweb bride arrives to his home in Northern Forest. A lot of horrible things happen because nobody can't die: mutilated soldiers in battles never get relief, old sick people are endlessly tortured by disease, even animal can not be killed anymore... The plot of the book unravels slowly. Vera Nazarian does not want to miss anything and in great detail shows us how absence of death influences all spheres of life and of course different reactions of people.

This is one of those times when it's better if you skip reading the book summary, because they wrote all events from the first part of Cobweb Bride Trilogy. So if you have read the summary, you might feel that the book ended without much happening or that it was boring. Since I skip reading book summaries exactly for the reason of not spoiling something, I didn't have this problem.

I enjoyed reading Cobweb Bride, although it was slow at times. I liked that Persephone aka. Percy is ordinary girl and not some awesome beauty and I enjoyed reading about her adventures. I expected much more romance because Cobweb Bride is advertised as fantasy romance, but the love story is very subtle and starts developing only at the end of the book.

In The End...

If you like reading about realistic heroines, alternate history, noble knights and quests, then Vera Nazarian wrote a perfect book for you. If you are looking for a classic retelling of Hades and Persephone myth or a lot of romance, you might be disappointed.