Author: Stephanie Fisher
Genre: Fantasy
Series: Tempris # 3
778 pages, Paperback
Publication: June 26, 2025
Source: Kindle Unlimited
Buy|AMAZON|
They thought the last time mage was dead. They were wrong.
Taly is back. Finally free of the Queen and out of the loop. But freedom doesn’t mean safety.
Tempris has changed while she was gone—and so has she. With enemies closing in from all sides, Taly must navigate a world that keeps rewriting itself beneath her feet.
Skye got her home. That should’ve been the hard part. But now he’s just a boy in love with a girl everyone wants to kill—and keeping her alive might cost him everything.
The Aion Gate is stirring. The island is under siege. And the enemy is circling ever closer.
The war for Tempris is coming. And it's coming for her.
MY THOUGHTS
Dawnbringer was five years in the making. I didn’t discover the book until two years ago, so I didn’t wait as long as others, but I was looking forward to it nonetheless. I loved the first two books (both were 5 stars) in the series so much that I even did a reread before starting Dawnbringer. To put it simply, this book does not live up to expectations or previous quality but instead was a massive disappointment. It felt like it was written by someone else.
I think most fans of the series had an idea or at least a hope, of where the story was going to go in this third installment. To say the story and characters took an entirely different path would be an understatement. Since the beginning of the first book, Shardless, the importance of the aion gate opening and hopefully seeing our protagonists cross into the human realm felt heavily emphasized, at least to me. Instead, the majority of the book was filled with a vanilla, boring villain named Bill terrorizing and wooing Taly. But that wasn’t even the worst part. The time magic was aggravating. Around 35% into the book, the crux of the novel, or supposed twist became apparent, and I was in disbelief. My immediate thought was...this was the best plot? best case scenario after five years? Really? It marked the beginning of countless stupid choices and endless miscommunication between Taly and Skye.
Speaking of Taly and Skye, they felt completely removed from the characters we met in the first two books. The majority of the story consisted of smut, arguments, and fighting. Of the two, who can out-do and save each other first. Good grief, it was getting on my last nerve. I could barely recognize the characters I once fell in love with. I also don’t recall Taly being this annoying. Her future self, Cori, was equally frustrating. By the end of the book, I went from loving Taly to outright hating her. I honestly don’t know if I’ll continue the series now. With book three, it felt DOA. Skye wasn’t much better. The sexual innuendos were “haha, whatever” at first, but eventually he came across like a teenager literally obsessed with sex for most of the book.
Dawnbringer was horrendously long for absolutely no good reason. As mentioned before, with problematic characterizations, an asinine villain, and a weak plot, the length felt completely uncalled for. Did readers really need multiple pages depicting Skye jacking off? No. Then there were POV from Sarina, Aidan, Ivain, and Aimee, none of which added anything meaningful to the story, again at least for me. And I know for a fact I neither wanted nor cared to be inside Aimee’s head.
It was a struggle to finish Dawnbringer because I genuinely cannot find a single good thing to say about it. I finished it out of spite and held onto hope (see above) that we’d finally see the aion gate open and Atlas become part of the plot but we didn’t get that. Sure, they opened the aion gate but how we got there and where it led, was anticlimactic and dull. And no, it didn't even open into the human realm! This might be the end of the series for me, especially if readers are expected to wait another three to five years for the next installment. After Dawnbringer, I’m not sure the story or characters can be redeemed from here.
I think most fans of the series had an idea or at least a hope, of where the story was going to go in this third installment. To say the story and characters took an entirely different path would be an understatement. Since the beginning of the first book, Shardless, the importance of the aion gate opening and hopefully seeing our protagonists cross into the human realm felt heavily emphasized, at least to me. Instead, the majority of the book was filled with a vanilla, boring villain named Bill terrorizing and wooing Taly. But that wasn’t even the worst part. The time magic was aggravating. Around 35% into the book, the crux of the novel, or supposed twist became apparent, and I was in disbelief. My immediate thought was...this was the best plot? best case scenario after five years? Really? It marked the beginning of countless stupid choices and endless miscommunication between Taly and Skye.
Speaking of Taly and Skye, they felt completely removed from the characters we met in the first two books. The majority of the story consisted of smut, arguments, and fighting. Of the two, who can out-do and save each other first. Good grief, it was getting on my last nerve. I could barely recognize the characters I once fell in love with. I also don’t recall Taly being this annoying. Her future self, Cori, was equally frustrating. By the end of the book, I went from loving Taly to outright hating her. I honestly don’t know if I’ll continue the series now. With book three, it felt DOA. Skye wasn’t much better. The sexual innuendos were “haha, whatever” at first, but eventually he came across like a teenager literally obsessed with sex for most of the book.
Dawnbringer was horrendously long for absolutely no good reason. As mentioned before, with problematic characterizations, an asinine villain, and a weak plot, the length felt completely uncalled for. Did readers really need multiple pages depicting Skye jacking off? No. Then there were POV from Sarina, Aidan, Ivain, and Aimee, none of which added anything meaningful to the story, again at least for me. And I know for a fact I neither wanted nor cared to be inside Aimee’s head.
It was a struggle to finish Dawnbringer because I genuinely cannot find a single good thing to say about it. I finished it out of spite and held onto hope (see above) that we’d finally see the aion gate open and Atlas become part of the plot but we didn’t get that. Sure, they opened the aion gate but how we got there and where it led, was anticlimactic and dull. And no, it didn't even open into the human realm! This might be the end of the series for me, especially if readers are expected to wait another three to five years for the next installment. After Dawnbringer, I’m not sure the story or characters can be redeemed from here.
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