Review: The Guardian’s Wildchild by Feather Stone

Title: The Guardian’s Wildchild
Author: Feather Stone
Publisher: Omnific Publishing
Genre: Adult, YA, Paranormal Romance (no vampires)

The Guardian’s Wildchild is a paranormal romance with soul—a rare and lovely thing. The paranormal elements are based on meditative and spiritual concepts and experiences, and expanded from there into the realm of magic. There are no vampires or werewolves, this book is much more unique and interesting than that.

The Guardians are a group of realised beings who live on an island off the coast of Seattle. They used to be all over the world but retreated there after persecution some time in the past and very few people know of their existence. The Guardians work for the higher good and have mind powers that create magic eg the main female character, Sidney can open locked doors, stop machines from working, communicate telepathically to other Guardians and even transmit a mental image of her body to a different place. Among other things, her brother can stop bullets. With the aid of a sun crystal, Guardians can manipulate matter as large as helicopters, and the bad guy wants the crystals.

In this case the bad guy is Madam, a cold, cruel and determined woman that thankfully remains shadowy in the book. She knows the crystals have power, but doesn’t realise that that’s only if a Guardian  is using it. She has a band of scientists and a private army firmly under her thumb. Their task is to learn how to use the crystals so she can—you guessed it—take over the world. I forgot to mention that this happens in a post apocalyptic earth where power sources are waning; Madam intends to solve this with the crystals. Her army is to make sure that no one else knows about or learns how to use them so that she will have total control over the thing that will solve the world’s power issues.

Enter Sidney, a Guardian, who, with her brother Danik, do a job for the resistance to the overly repressive US government who instituted martial law when a huge earthquake and resultant tsunami wiped out most of America. Things have settled down, the government hasn’t eased up with the times. The admiral of the navy, though a good man at heart, is tied up with Madam’s plan, and Sidney is going to steal the file that reveals all.

She gets caught and ends up on a cruise ship that has been adapted for military use. Sam is the captain of the ship. Though he had nothing to do with the resistance, his wife did and she was murdered for trying to get the same file. At that point, the admiral took his sons and stuck Sam on this ship where he has to interrogate then execute prisoners sent to him for that purpose. It’s all very nice on the surface, but Sam doesn’t like that part of the job and he wants his sons back.

When Sidney arrives, Sam is supposed to execute her immediately, but he insists on not diverging from protocol and interrogates her first. This is a romance, so I won’t say more about what happens, except that a Guardian gone bad is involved, Madam wants Sidney dead and many wheelings and dealings happen to bring us to the end.

My only issue with the book was the end, not because of its divergence from the usual, but because the powers of the Guardians to do what they did with Sam was completely inconsistent with what they weren’t able to do with Sidney. It stretched my belief beyond its breaking point and muddied the main point which was that the spiritual realm is not removed from the material world and provides solace and support in a very tangible way. I would completely remove the plot thread that caused the bit of magic with Sam at the end. Though it was a nice idea, it wasn’t necessary for the story, and even if it stayed in, the end would have been a much more powerful statement without the magic on Sam.

Definitely a great read though, especially if you like a spiritual angle to your stories and heroes who made their decisions based on what is right for the higher good.

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