Seduced by Shadows by Jessa Slade is an amazingly clever new world where the vulnerable are possessed by Demons and doomed to an existence of atonement and repentance by fighting the creatures that escape across the veil from the lesser realm to attack the world.

Sera Littlejohn has battled her way back from horrendous injuries to walk again, but her injuries and constant pain will never lessen. She also carries inside her the scars of her mother’s suicide and her father’s dementia, so that when a demon breaks through the veil and offers her the chance to finally understand ‘why’ this has all happened her temptation leads her into possession.  She becomes a talyan, one of the band of warriors who fight against evil ... the first female talyan in millennia.

Ferris Archer tried to guide her through her transition and help her understand her strengths. But it is the unrelenting and unending battle that is now their existence that makes forming any bond between the warriors almost impossible … unless they’re strong enough to battle fate and forge their own talyan bond.
This is a new treatment for demons and it’s a dark and painful world Jessa Slade has created. She deals with the metaphysics of good and evil, repentance and forgiveness within the relationship she builds between Sera and Archer.

Unfortunately there was such an emphasis on the world building and the questioning of what it’s all about, that it was a long time into the book before the characters of Sera and Archer started to engage me on an emotional level. There was a lot of intellectualizing, but not enough feeling. I kept wanting to know more about Archer, his background, his motivations, his feelings … but for most of the book he was presented as the embodiment of hopelessness and despair, while Sera was representative of the search for, and belief in, hope. It simply took too long for this sense of hope to emerge. Thankfully, the last quarter of the book finally started living up to the potential being hinted at and I could start to like the characters, get into the flow of the action and enjoy me reading.

There’s something about a debut author that just tugs at my heartstrings. There’s the knowledge that they have spent a huge amount of time writing while wondering if this is a career they can build, if their books is any good, whether or not they’ll be published.  It’s a journey that seems so brave.

So knowing that Seduced by Shadows was Jessa Slade’s debut novel made me want to find every good thing I could about it and share these positive thoughts with others so that her courage would be rewarded. However *sigh* it’s more complicated than that.

There are many, many good things about Seduced by Shadows, primarily the imaginative world she has created, the tension between good and evil and the development of Sera’s character.

With her strong world building Jessa Slade has set the scene for a series of books that will hopefully build on the strengths of this first book and ease the awkwardness that sometimes came through. Basically she has set the scene for a series that might really surprise us.