An astonishing competition set in the four seasons, a ruthless emperor, and a brilliant inventor prince, with one girl to undo them all. A yokai girl discovers her destiny as she enters a competition to become the Empress of her divided nation in this silk-painted story of dreams and nightmares.

Empress of All Seasons is an epic YA fantasy stand-alone that I'm still thinking about days after finishing it. The mc in this book is not your typical heroine. In fact this book in general is not your typical YA fantasy, there's no overused cliches or tropes here. It's different to other books currently on the market, The mc's journey was a captivating one and the plot took a direction I wasn't expecting. If you're on the lookout for a book about female empowerment I would highly recommend this one.

So I actually didn’t read this because the PDF file doesn’t work on my Kindle.

Wow this book does not hold back.

“Empress of all Seasons” is a powerful story about a girl raised to believe she was less than because of her plainness, work to become that of a warrior ready to join the competition to win the title of Empress. Coming face to face with the horrors her people and others of a similar kind face in the city she pushes herself to succeed and bring honor to all and more importantly grant them the freedom they desire above all, but when enemies looking to enslave and rule go out of their way to tarnish her name she must rise up and fight using all that she knows and accept herself for who she is and not how she appears.

I know I probably shouldn’t say wow again but wow. I don’t even know where to begin, on one hand I thought this was going to follow the usual format of most fantasy novels where there’s a series of tasks the heroine needs to complete in order to gain a member of nobility’s favor while abandoning where they’ve come from but this turns that completely around and gives us someone who wasn’t able to shine until she left home but never forgot her roots and instead learned to embrace all that she was in order to go head to head with the enemy.

There’s a lot of feminism in this that I have to applaud, everything from the main character herself to the snippets of mythology that sprinkle throughout this book giving us better insights into the world and the creators all the way through to the conclusion that parallels that of Mari’s story. My only critique is that this is a stand alone! I wanted to see more of this new found self confidence and the power she had in herself to stand up for her people! Give me an entire trilogy of her and I would be the happiest girl in the world!

This book was a surprise and if you’re thinking your getting an elemental hunger games you better think again because this is a book I’m going to be recommending to any one and everyone for a long time because it’s so much bigger than surviving a competition it’s about the acceptance of who you are and that is good enough and no one, especially men or anyone else who thinks to tie you down can take that away from you.

**special thanks to the publishers and netgalley for providing an arc in exchange for a fair and honest review**