Finally, finally it was June and the final installment of “The Prison Healer”series was released. And let me tell you, waiting for so long after that cliffhanger in The Gilded Cage was pure torture. How will this end for Kiva and Jaren? It was time to find out. Content warning: this review contains spoilers for the first two books The Prison Healer and The Gilded Cage.

Title: The Blood Traitor
Author: Lynette Noni
Series: The Prison Healer #3
Publish date: June 14, 2022
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780358436379
Genre: Young Adult, Fantasy

She’d failed them. All of them. And now she was paying the price.
Kiva thought she knew what she wanted—revenge. But feelings change, people change… everything has changed.
After what happened at the palace, Kiva is desperate to know if her friends and family are safe, and whether those she wronged can ever forgive her. But with the kingdoms closer to the brink of war than they’ve ever been, and Kiva far away from the conflict, more is at stake than her own broken heart.
A fresh start will mean a perilous quest, forcing mortal enemies and uneasy allies together in a race against the clock to save not just Evalon, but all of Wenderall. With her loyalties now set, Kiva can no longer just survive—she must fight for what she believes in. For who she believes in. But with danger coming from every side, and the lives of everyone she loves at risk, does she have what it takes to stand, or will she fall?

The Blood Traitor picks up right where The Gilded Cage left of. Kiva is an inmate at Zalindov again and needs to survive in order to succeed in her mission. She reunites wit her fellow inmate Cresta and actually they happen to be needing each other a lot. Furrther on in the story, so much happens and an actually quest/heist is waiting for Kiva and the others. This makes this book differen from the previous two books, these were quite slow in terms of action and plot. Throughout the series, all characters have grown in their own ways. Kiva is torn between what she has known her whole life and what she has learnt during her time in Valenia. Jaren on the other hand doesn’t know how to deal with what happened to him and his family, caused by Zuleeka and indirectly by Kiva. She betrayed him and his loved ones and he just doesn’t know how to overcome this. Whilst the story continues, both find a way to deal with their struggles and learn to communicate those. Normally I’m not one for novellas, but for this series I would love to have a novella written from Jaren’s POV about the time and his feelings about what happened between The Gilded Cage and The Blood Traitor. We get the story from Kiva, told in a third person narrative, but I guess that Jaren’s POV would be very interesting. We just don’t get toknow much about him and his thoughts.

In The Blood Traitor, more traveling occurs. Beforre, readers only got to know Zalindov, Valenia and a little town nearby. Now, because of their quest, the group has to travel to other kingdoms to retrieve the things they need. Therefore, the world of this series finally gets explored a little more, allbeit briefly. This series focuses on the characters and plot. It also doesn’t need an in depth world building, but it would have been nice somehow. Throughout this entire book, the threat of Zuleeka’s power is there which makes the entire atmosphere quite tense.

The writing is just like the other books, smooth. Before you know it, you’ve read more than you initially planned on. However, a first person narrative and a dual POV narrative would have been lovely. This way, we would have gotten to know Kiva’s and Jaren’s thoughts better and even have been able to read some of their inner monologues.

This book has more of a focus on the plot. Of course there have been plot lines in the first two books, but these were more character driven. Because of what needs to be done to end Zuleeka once and for all, this book needs mroe plot, which has been excecuted well. Readers are intriged from the first page. What will happen to Kiva? Will she and Jaren be reunited and will he forgive her? These are the questions readers get to ask themselves and want answers to. Together with the writing and the tense atmosphere, The Blood Traitor is intriguing from start to finish.

Overall, I really enjoyed “The Prison Healer” series. These books are perfect for getting out of any reading slump. They are intriguing from start to finish, especially The Gilded Cage and The Blood Traitor. If you haven’t picked them up yet, you really should this summer.