Ordained by Devon Ashley review

Ordained by Devon Ashley (The Immortal Archives #1)

won from the author

Synopsis from Goodreads
Normally, the school creates the hunters - not the monsters.

Abby Sorrensten likes to play rough. Ripping the horns off the foreheads of demons, manipulating lightning and setting things on fire with the flick of your wrist can give you a serious rush. So she probably wasn’t the best choice for the Order’s experimental training program. Thirteen years of isolation, lack of affection and a bruised and broken body from horrendous training sessions creates more than just an exceptional fighter. It creates an evil within - an evil responsible for several deaths the night she left.

Two hundred years later Abby resurfaces as the very thing the Order trained her to kill: a vampire. A mythical demon has set his sights on the school and only the ordained hunter has the powers to face it. Unbeknownst to the Order, Abby’s their precious ordained one and their only chance for survival. As much as she would love to leave them hanging, she’s not willing to risk the life of Emily, a fellow friend and hunter also fed up with the organization.

But for Abby, locking herself away in a fortress with angry descendants of those she killed causes suspicions and tensions to run high. Abby must learn the demon’s weaknesses for battle before the Order learns hers.

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Hm-m.. This is a difficult book to judge, and I'm not entirely comfortable with the whole synopsis being focused exclusively on Abby. There are four points of view, four stories in this book:


Abby - as a failed experiment of the Order, a vampire huntress with dark powers and a remarkable destiny;


Emily - her student, a young vampire huntress, whose life Abby saved and whom she continues to train;


Noel - Abby's husband and advisor;

Valerie - a clairvoyant of the Order. 


The Order is a structure which trains vampire hunters since their birth. It's an old institute with a lot of obsolete views and as it often happens those views make the whole structure a failure. There are a lot of vampires in the world, and only few hunters at a time fighting them. Needless to say, the mortality rate is almost 100% and the Order numbers are dwindling.


There is a prophecy which says about a coming battle between a powerful demon Morphus, a servant of Greek goddess Erin and an ordained huntress, who represents goddess  Athena (I hope I got the names right!)


Abby, a black sheep of the Order who left to never come back is that huntress and now she needs to deal with her past and find a way to win the battle to fulfill her destiny.


Neither Noel, who sounds like a wonderful and caring man nor Abby are happy to return, and they have to go through hostility, fear and curiosity of students and advisors with only two allies on their side - Emily and Valerie.


The book is full of dark secrets, Abby painful memories, her struggles, and battles with demons.


To be able to mark this book properly I have to split it in two parts: first 2/3 and the last third. I would say first part is 6/10 and the last is 8.5/10. It's the last part which makes you pick up the pace and which changes the book from average to remarkably good. 

I absolutely loved the ending, and I'm very grateful to have the second book Metamorphosis at hand to find out what happens next. It was a deceptively addictive read.

My only problem is that I wanted to know more about the world, there was so much more to Abby and Noel's past, but the only world I saw was the one revolving around the Order's school grounds.

Order from Amazon

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Если вы переживёте перые две трети книги, которые достаточно средненькие, то последняя треть окупит всё. Я сама не заметила как в какой-то момент погрузилась в повествование и не могла оторваться пока всё не дочитала. Тут же появилось желание взяться за вторую книгу - Метаморфозис.


Несмотря на синопсис книга эта о 4-х персонажах:


1.Абби - бывшей охотнице за вампирами Ордена, оказавшейся жертвой их неудачных экспериментов и Предназначенной охотницей.


2. Ноэле - её муже, учителе и советнике.


3. Эмили - молодой охотнице за вампирами, жизнь которой спасла Абби, и которая теперь стала ученицей последней.


4. И наконец, Валери - ясновидящей Ордена.


Пророчество воплощается в жизнь о битве могущественного демона с Предназначенной охотницей во имя двух богинь - Афины и Эрин.


У Абби есть совсем немного времени, чтобы попытаться узнать как победить демона, но для этого она должна вернуться в Орден, с которым у неё связаны страшные воспоминания.


В книге полно тёмных секретов, борьбы с демонами и попыток познать себя. Читать точно стоит из-за последних 100-120 страниц :)

7.5/10