Candidate

****

4 Stars/5

Thanks to Rachel Carter for giving me this book to review.

20 year old Ryiah is a black mage of combat but she wants to be The Black Mage, the role she has dreamed of becoming and in a year she will have a chance at the Candidacy. However, she will be going up against the only person she has been unable to beat, Darren, the non-heir and her fiancé. In the meantime she has to prove herself but Jerar is on the brink of war and needs all the allies it can to save lives. Is Ryiah able to prepare for the Candidacy and coping with the responsibility of being Darren’s future wife, and will she be able to cope with what will come after?

Candidate is the very good third book in the Black Mage. It was fast paced and unpredictable, which meant that I stayed up late into the night to find out what was going to happen next. This book had action and more politics than the previous books, but while there was lots of romance, I did not feel it was a much or as intense as I was expecting considering Ryiah and Darren are able to be a couple now.

Ryiah is happy at the start of the book but is also struggling as people are paying more attention to her and think she has gotten everything because of Darren rather than her hard work. But she is still full of passion and determination but I did feel she put her ambition above other more important priorities. I liked how we got to know Darren better in this book, more about his past and want makes him tick, and we saw how much he cared for Ryiah. One thing that I missed in this book was Alex and Ella as they were very important characters in the previous books but they were hardly in this one.

This was a really enjoyable book and I am really looking forward to the next and final book Last Stand, but one thing is for sure it will be hard to predict what will happen next. I would recommend Candidate to fans of the first two books in the Black Mage Series, First Year and Apprentice.