One minute, Nymeria was just a college sophomore; the next, she was bewildered, panicked, and part of a world she had no idea existed — one which is now on the precipice of war and destruction. Great lines of light appear in the sky, and all around her people appear to be turning into animals or fairy-tale creatures. As Nymeria flees a chaotic school full of people suddenly turning into magic creatures and attacking each other, she’s led to safety by a friend of hers, Jake, who has obviously been hiding something. Jake is an elf — and so is Nymeria. She’s not just any old elf, though, she’s the princess of a city who has been hidden in the human world — and hidden from herself — to protect her from a fated prophecy. Now, however, the woman and the hour have met. The Rupture is part one of a series in which Nym, still getting used to her role and powers, is forced into a position of responsibility as she tries to restore peace before all hell or chaos-monster dragons break loose.

A fantasy novel of this kind is outside my usual reading scope, but considering that this summer my scope has been ‘1960s politicians’, it could do with a little freshening up. The reader is thrown, with Nym, into an unfamiliar world to sort out what’s happened. What we find is that the magical world used to be concealed from humans, but something’s happened to create the Rupture — now magical creatures, including humans who use magic (witches), are visible unless they take particular pains to conceal themselves with ‘glamour’. Part of the fun of starting a new fantasy series is seeing where it strikes a balance between old tropes and new ideas; there are a lot of familiar magical races here, but others exist with different ‘spins.’ This world has a lot of races who keep entirely to themselves, like the fae folk, as well as others like elves who are in regular contact with ‘shifters’ and witches. While there are some familiar tropes, like elves being graceful creatures who prefer the forest, and ogres being nasty beings all around, there are also variations. We have characters who ‘read’ like werewolves, for instance — shifting into wolves, living together, operating as a pack with an alpha — but they’re part of a larger group called shifters, or humans who can shift into an animal form and often live that way. One shifter will become increasingly important to Nym, resulting in a romance thread that’s not graphic.

Because this is the beginning of a series, we have a dramatic denouement at the end, but not the epic finale; this book appears to be mostly about introducing us to the characters and worldbuilding, though Nym does make significant progress on her quest, sometimes unintentionally. Because she is completely new to being a magical creature, Nym has no control over her powers at first and unintentionally attracts attention from creatures of the deep forest, like the centaurs; contact with whom will be important later on in the series. Her inability to control her powers, basically being a walking piece of magical explosive ordnance, also makes friendships and alliances critical, because she is completely vulnerable after she loses control.

All in all, an interesting start to a new series! I was as confused as Nym first, but enjoyed starting to get to know this new world.