Hexult by Perry Aylen

Target Audience: Teens/Young Adults
Genre: Fantasy/Fiction

After much kindle trouble I finally got to finishing this book and a big thanks to the author for the endless patience! A big big thank you goes to Perry Aylen (actually two very clever people working on the same novel!) for asking me to review this book.
To kick my review off here's the Goodreads synopsis to give you a brief introduction:

'When the seas rose and the world froze, much knowledge was lost.
Mysterious twins, Jacob and Elya, shipwrecked in Hexult, discover their superior understanding of science is mistaken for magic by the superstitious islanders.
With the aid of Aulf the mailman and his fiery crewmate, Ingar, the twins must overcome terrible tragedy and danger, to save their reputations and their lives.'


I love a good fantasty novel, especially as I'm one of those people who can imagine themselves in the places described in a book and I had no problems in doing so with this one. The text is so richly descriptive and highly imaginative that I found I could picture everything with clarity, from the Varja Crevasse and on to the wonderfully named Islands of Orking Do, Quayven and Pelago (among others!).
With regards to this, perhaps the only issue I had with this novel was that there was a lot of new terms and places to absorb and at first I found myself struggling to take it all in, but by the time I was further into the novel and place names and people had been repeated I found that it had all sunk in, so much so that even with the huge gap in reading this book due to my broken kindle, I was able to remember names of places and people with ease when I went to finish it.


For those who love your adventure and magic (erm science, I mean) this is also an adventure story with a twist and I found myself laughing on occasion at the citizens of Hexult who, in the bigger part, drove me nuts with their superstitions, and I found myself wanting to yell at them all.
One of the things that I quickly came to wonder was if the seas did rise and the world froze over and people forgot about science and common sense, would we go back to believing such things as magic, prophecy and judging people on such things? Or would we at least retain some of our knowledge? To me it would feel like a step backwards, but reading this book, it makes complete sense, because it would be quite easy in the absence of knowledge to revert to a very medieval attitude.


All that aside, the trips across the ice coupled with the fights, the raiding and the fantastical buildings that are created captured my imagination with ease and had my heart racing in some instances and I was left fascinated by some of the ideas and by the simple thought that it only takes a small group of people to change the world, even in the face of so much adversity and superstition. 
Character wise I loved the twins and how they dealt with the situation they were dropped into despite everything that was against them and I got rather attached to Aulf and Ingar too so I will definitely be reading the sequel to this to find out what happens next.


If your looking for something different to read give this a go, you won't be disappointed.







For more info on Hexult or the Author, visit the website: Hexult