As space operas go, The Last Lumenian trilogy is a briskly told story with the elements of romance and fantasy that add up to a classic adventure. The books provide solid escapism along with peril, romance, and a young woman’s coming of age, amid intergalactic war and political wrangling. Author S.G Blaise’s highly entertaining series has earned an aggregate review of 4.3 stars on Goodreads with over 4,850 ratings. Let’s take a look at each book in the series.
The Last Lumenian
The first in the trilogy introduces heroine Lilla, a thoughtful nineteen-year-old princess of her realm, whose frequent panic attacks signal a deep discomfort with her privilege and the mannered customs of her father’s court.
The novel opens with a thrilling, risky space flight that ends in a terrible collision, before rewinding six months, to a fraught royal wedding. Lilla’s father, the remote king of a once proud, if once less respectable people of Uhna, prepares to wed his young bride. While Lilla still mourns her mother, her father’s rule takes his people ever further from their ‘pirate past’.
While detailing the why and how of Lilla’s escape from this rigid caste and class-bound milieu, The Last Lumenian, with its careful world-building, gives her more to fight for than personal freedom.
True Teryn
In True Teryn, haunted by terrifying visions and dreams detailing the destruction of worlds, Lilla faces a seemingly impossible task, as well as more demands on the relationship with the man she loves.
The second novel in the Last Lumenian trilogy binds previous narrative threads in a high stakes mission of brutal honour debts, ancient magic and dazzling technology, alongside wit, guile and passion. Throughout, Lilla and her universe remain engaging and vivid.
Proud Pada
Proud Pada finds Lilla anticipating her own marriage, one not without its own tensions, as she waits to meet her prospective father-in-law, ‘ruler of the Teryn Praelium—the most dangerous empire in the Seven Galaxies.’
She faces further challenge, growing into life as leader of a small, scrappy rebellion, against her own father’s totalitarian rule as well as that of ‘…a warmongering emperor who has conquered many worlds and displaced thousands of refugees from their homes’.
Of course, neither wedding nor rebellion go quite according to plan, setting the scene for a taut murder and conspiracy plot.