Review - The Pearl Savage

Clara Williamson is a reluctant princess and daughter to Queen Ada, lover of wine...who exchanges Clara's liberty for free trade of grapes from another sphere...

Bracus, who as a protector of the Band, must save his clan's people from extinction Outside...

Charles, Clara's long-time companion, keeps his love for Clara tightly veiled...

Prince Frederic, her sadistic betrothed, bent on having her...and she, escaping his grasp...

Suddenly, with both the clan and sphere peoples' destiny in her hands, Clara finds herself torn between love and duty...


I almost left the back cover summary out because it doesn’t do The Pearl Savage justice. Form the pitch The Pearl Savage comes off as a love square with some other stuff possibly going on in the background, and at first I was dubious about reading it. Thankfully, the story was captivating and so much more than the cover lead me to believe.

The backdrop was classic sci fi without being stale. A world in cataclysm saved just in the nick of time but forced to self contained spheres to survive. The only problem: not everyone can fit in the spheres, so some people get left out to die while the rest of the population scuttles off into their hiddy holes. Fast forward a hundred plus years, and it turns out that not all the people who were left for dead actually died, so now there are two societies the one inside the spheres and the one outside the sphere. In a story full of plot twists and secret agendas the two worlds collide.

As someone who likes a little violence in what I read (and what I write) the nitty gritty nature of the relationships was a great. There was a lot of substantial tension between all of the characters, and by the end of the third chapter I'm proud to say I truly hated some of them (always a good sign). An added bonus was that the various types of abuse the characters had to go through were realistically portrayed adding a tragic bite to the story.

The third person narrative was also a refreshing change of pace. Instead of limiting the narrator to focusing on one individual’s experiences the narrator was free to roam. It gave the story a fuller feeling, and allowed the reader to have a better picture of what was really going on. Thankfully, that didn’t mean that The Pearl Savage was transparent, but rather that the plot twists had to be hidden in such a way that they came as a genuine surprise not only to the reader but to the characters as well.

Once it’s all said and done, I’m excited to see where Clara’s story goes and what type of woman she evolves into.

-Aaron