That being said, book three can, sort of, stand by itself. You miss the back stories of the characters, but things flow smoothly if you read it first like I did. I ended up getting the first and second book on the Nook and am now reading through them a second time, which is why I've decided to go ahead and review them - in order - since I have all three.
The Last Stormlord is book #1 in the Watergivers series and is perhaps the hardest of the three books to read. You are thrown into a fantasy, desert world where life-giving/saving water is distributed to the land by an old and dying "Stormlord."
The world is populated, sparsely, with individuals who can detect or move water. The lesser of these are reeves and they monitor the water in cisterns and distribution within a city. Then there are rainlords who can sense water around them to varying degrees and move it. Then stormlords.
Unfortunately, the last stormlord is dying and the plot of the story focuses on a search for water sensitive youths.
The story jumps between three different areas - the city of Breccia where the dying Stormlord and a number of rainlords live, the city of Scarcleft (sp?) and the Gibber Quarter where the future stormlord and main character of the three books is found.
The book jumps not only between stories of sets of characters and locations, but also in chunks of time. Several times in the stories months and years jump past, which you may not catch right away if you aren't paying attention to the headers of the story and the locations.
Ultimately, the first book in this series is a lot of world building, introducing us to multiple protagonists and antagonists, telling the back story and launching into the start of the ultimate stories. It can be a bit hard to get into and to understand if you aren't expecting a thought provoking read. And this would be why I give this book out of the series a 3 out of 5 star rating. While world building is important, the way things jump around, the length of time it takes to build the world and the way it's built are not ideal.
That being said, if you are looking for a book that has both strong female and male protagonists and interesting antagonists along with a harsh world, I strongly suggest reading it because the books get better after you get through the first book and things will make more sense.
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