The Medoran Chronicles Books 1-3
11:43 AM
Author // Lynette Noni
Publication Date // 2015, 2016, 2017
Publisher // Pantera Press
Readership //Young Adult
Genre // Fantasy
Rating // ✭✭✭✭ - ✭✭✭✭⭐︎
synopsis.
Akarnae
With just one step, sixteen-year-old Alexandra Jennings's world changes—literally.
Dreading her first day at a new school, Alex is stunned when she walks through a doorway and finds herself stranded in Medora, a fantasy world full of impossibilities. Desperate to return home, she learns that only a man named Professor Marselle can help her... but he's missing.
While waiting for him to reappear, Alex attends Akarnae Academy, Medora's boarding school for teenagers with extraordinary gifts. She soon starts to enjoy her bizarre new world and the friends who embrace her as one of their own, but strange things are happening at Akarnae, and Alex can't ignore her fear that something unexpected... something sinister... is looming.
An unwilling pawn in a deadly game, Alex's shoulders bear the crushing weight of an entire race's survival. Only she can save the Medorans, but what if doing so prevents her from ever returning home?
Will Alex risk her entire world—and maybe even her life—to save Medora?
review.
The Medoran Chronicles are a very popular young adult fantasy series, written by Australian author, Lynette Noni. I’d heard a lot of positive things about the series prior to reading so I was really interested to see what people were talking about.
Ultimately, I found this series to be really engaging.
It is the story of Alex Jennings, a sixteen-year old who steps through a doorway from Earth to Medora - an alternate world, where some humans have special gifts and abilities, magic exists and the only hope she has for getting home is currently on an extended absence. While waiting for Professor Marselle to return, Alex is enrolled at Akarnae - a school for gifted humans - and begins to learn about the strange, fantastical world she has found herself in, and the people who inhabit it. She finds herself caught in an unwitting pawn in a game that has been played for many years, with the fate of Medora in her hands.
I won’t go into much detail about Raelia and Draekora, simply because talking about the events of those books will lend itself to spoilers in Akarnae, but I did want to review the series as a whole, because I read them almost back-to-back.
There are a lot of things to love about the series.
It is very easy to read - Lynette Noni has a simple, yet effective, writing style that is very easy to follow and she keeps the pace up in all of the books so you’re constantly turning the page to find out what happens next.
The fantastical setting of Medora is incredibly intriguing - each book explores one new aspect of it, so the world is being built up in each book, rather than having an entire new world’s history thrown at us in the first story. We discover the world as Alex discovers it, and this makes it easier to invest in the world. (And, if nothing else, you need to read the first book for the library at Akarnae, which is a character in its’ own right and truly fabulous.)
There is great friendship representation in this book, between girls and boys. Two of the first people Alex meets upon arriving in Medora are Jordan and Bear and the two boys take Alex under their wing and there’s never a hint that either want a romance with her. Imagine that? As the books progress, Alex’s friendship group expands and the thing that I love about that is how her other friends accept, welcome and expand their own friendship groups as a result.
There are some truly interesting magical creatures that make appearances throughout the series so far, and while I can’t say which ones (spoilers!) they’re all well-thought out and often times the highlight of the story for me.
I do have a small list of things that frustrated me a little bit: Alex finds herself in a lot of strange and dangerous situations, and more often than not I found the solutions to these situations to be super-simplistic. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it did break the flow of reading for me while I pondered on the ease of solving said problems. Alex fills the role as a ‘Chosen One’ and a lot of the things that you would expect to happen as a result of that trope do, which I found to be a bit predictable. There were also moments when some fairly obviously things were about to happen (especially in Draekora) and Alex appears to be completely oblivious, which made me wonder if she’d been paying attention to anything that had happened to her previously.
But honestly? The good outweighs the negative in this series, and I’m definitely excited for the fourth book to be released to find out what’s going to happen next, and what new places we get to visit within Medora.
I rated both Akarnae and Raelia 4 stars and Draekora 4.5 stars. A great, easy-to-read #loveozya fantasy adventure series.
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