Poison’s Kiss by Breeana Shields Blog Tour

We are excited to be a part of the blog tour for Poison’s Kiss today!! Before we share our thoughts, how about we tell you about the book!

Poison's Kiss by Breeana Shields
(Website, Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads)Published by Random House Children's Books Genres: Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology, Fantasy & Magic, Young Adult
Format: ARC

A teenage assassin kills with a single kiss until she is ordered to kill the one boy she loves. This commercial YA fantasy is romantic and addictive like-- a poison kiss-- and will thrill fans of Sarah J. Maas and Victoria Aveyard.

Marinda has kissed dozens of boys. They all die afterward. It s a miserable life, but being a visha kanya a poison maiden is what she was created to do. Marinda serves the Raja by dispatching his enemies with only her lips as a weapon.

Until now, the men she was ordered to kiss have been strangers, enemies of the kingdom. Then she receives orders to kiss Deven, a boy she knows too well to be convinced he needs to die. She begins to question who she s really working for. And that is a thread that, once pulled, will unravel more than she can afford to lose.

This rich, surprising, and accessible debut is based in Indian folklore and delivers a story that will keep readers on the edge of their seats.

I’ll admit that I hadn’t heard anything about the Indian folk tales about the Visha Kanya prior to picking up this book. The Visha Kanya were women assassins whose blood and other fluids were considered to be poisonous. These young girls are raised by ingesting the poisons from a young age and those that survived the ‘training’ were considered to be lethal to others.

In Poison’s Kiss, Miranda is a Visha Kanya and she’s carried out the orders of the Raja dutifully… kissing and killing her targets without worry because after all, if the Raja orders these men dead, they must are enemies of the kingdom… right?

That is until she receives orders to kiss a boy who she knows well… one she knows isn’t an enemy, and this causes her to start questioning what she’s been doing all these years, and what she finds out turns her world upside down.

I was so intrigued by the idea of these assassins, and I’ll be honest, once I started reading this, I had a really hard time putting the book aside. Shields has written a riveting, action packed story that I ended up reading in just one day.

No one in this story is quite who they appear to be and I think that is what made this story so intriguing for me. Marinda hasn’t had an easy upbringing, and her duties as the Visha Kanya pull at her conscience daily. The one bright spot in her life has been her brother Mani and I really loved the devotion that she feels for this little boy. Shields really uses that to build the situation and struggles that Marinda finds herself in. When Deven enters the story, I didn’t know quite what to make of him, because it’s obvious we don’t know everything about him that we need to, but Shields does a wonderful job of unravelling the secrets as the story progresses with twists I didn’t expect.

There of course is a romance here… and it was sweet and didn’t take over the plot of the story, which is always nice. I liked that you don’t really know what Deven’s intentions are from the get go, and I liked that he’s not exactly who you might think… it added another layer of intrigue to an already engaging read.

If I had one complaint I think it would be that the end of book 1 kind of jumps around a bit and didn’t flow quite as smoothly as I felt the rest of the story did, but that is it… Other than that, this was a complete hit for me. With wonderful writing, interesting characters and a riveting plot, Shields will have you on the edge of your seat reading this mix of fantasy and folklore, and the last chapter will have you begging for book 2 immediately.

I’m definitely looking forward to more from Breeana Shields and more in this wonderful world she’s created.

Thank you to the publisher for the early copy in exchange for my honest thoughts.

About Breeana Shields

Breeana Shields graduated from Brigham Young University with a BA in English. Her debut young adult fantasy, POISON'S KISS, will be released from Random House in 2017, with a sequel to follow in 2018. When she’s not writing, Breeana loves reading, playing board games and spending time with her husband, three children and an extremely spoiled miniature poodle. She lives in the Pacific Northwest, where it drizzles, rains or pours nine months of the year, but then transforms into paradise during the other three. She’s willing to make the trade-off.

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