The Synopsis:

Cantor D’Ahma waited his whole life for this day. Born with a gift to jump between worlds, the young realm walker is finally ready to leave his elderly mentor and accept his role as protector and defender of the realms.

But mere hours after he steps through his first portal, Cantor discovers that his job will be more dangerous and difficult than he ever imagined. The realms are plagued with crime and cruelty, and even members of the once-noble Realm Walkers Guild can no longer be trusted. To make matters worse, his first assignment—finding a dragon to assist him on his quest—has led him to Bridger, who is clearly inept and won’t leave him alone.

With the help of his new friends Bixby and Dukmee, Cantor must uncover the secrets of the corrupt guild before they become too powerful to be stopped. But his skills aren’t progressing as fast as he would like, and as he finds himself deeper and deeper in the guild’s layers of deceit, Cantor struggles to determine where his true allegiance lies.

I received this book from the author/publisher for the purpose of this review. All comments and opinions are entirely my own.

Review:

When you’re born with a gift, it’s your responsibility to protect it.

Cantor D’Ahma is a character who has a tendency to take things too seriously. He has a rebellious nature about him and isn’t fond of following orders. However once his world begins to fall apart, all he wants is his old life back to normal.

I adored the characters of One Realm Beyond! Cantor, Bixby, Bridger, and Dukmee are an entertaining group to say the least, but they also work together and help each other in ways that really makes them dynamic.

As for the story, I considered it to be very slow. It took almost the entire first half of the book before anything “bad” even happened. Yes, there were some challenging dilemmas in the beginning, but nothing of consequence happened, making everything look really easy. Everything also happened really fast -I know I just said it was too slow, so I’ll explain! The action scenes began and ended too quickly. It took a lot of time to lead up to those action scenes and then they were over almost as soon as they had started.

I also didn’t like that I would be reading one chapter and then the next chapter was taking place over a month later without any warning. This left a lot of confusion.

However, as I mentioned before, the characters more than made up for the loss of conflict. Their personalities are just so complex and well captured, especially for Fantasy. It’s a clean book, no cursing, sexual comments or scenes, and as I mentioned before, the action is almost non-existent. So in the end, I was actually very pleased with the book.

I give it 4 out of 5 stars and recommend it to younger teens and readers who appreciate character development.

Catch our review of book 2: Two Renegade Realms

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