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The Inheritance (Breach Wars, #1)

Ilona Andrews,

Candice Slater (Illustrator)

Start date: September 1, 2025

Finish date: September 30, 2025

Discussion: Book of the Month

Why we're reading this: Voted as our “Most popular books Published in August 2025” September BOM
[close] Voted as our “Most popular books Published in August 2025” September BOM

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Book of the Month

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* BOM: Group Read History [2025]
By Steph , Serious series addict · 9 posts · 22 views

last updated Aug 30, 2025 12:41AM

* BOM: Comments & Suggestions
By Steph , Serious series addict · 38 posts · 229 views

last updated Mar 15, 2012 06:15PM

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What Members Thought

Aug 15, 2025 Katyana rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites, fantasy, sci-fi

Well, today I am a sleep-deprived mess because I stayed up until 3am finishing this book. I tried to make myself quit around midnight, but it was a complete fail. Anyway!

This is one of my favorite authors (or I guess I should say two of my favorite authors), so it isn't a huge surprise that I loved it. I held off on reading the serial version they released of this story on their website because I'm just horribly impatient once I start a thing and know the characters. After their first Innkeeper Well, today I am a sleep-deprived mess because I stayed up until 3am finishing this book. I tried to make myself quit around midnight, but it was a complete fail. Anyway!

This is one of my favorite authors (or I guess I should say two of my favorite authors), so it isn't a huge surprise that I loved it. I held off on reading the serial version they released of this story on their website because I'm just horribly impatient once I start a thing and know the characters. After their first Innkeeper serial, which I both loved and died a bit inside weekly at having to pause after just one chapter each week, I decided to just hold off for the whole thing to land and get published. (Though my sleep schedule would probably be happier if I read the serial version, ha!)

I really loved it. It is a fun mash-up of UF and sci-fi, with a some flavors of dystopia (not entirely - society didn't collapse, but the whole world was changed by these gates) and even some of the dungeon crawl RPG tone at times.

The basic set-up is that one day these holes/gates popped up all over the globe. They were kind of freaky but didn't seem to do much - you could see inside them and they were a gate to a different landscape, something alien. The world panicked at first, but then a month went by and nothing happened...so everyone just went about life as usual, slightly annoyed at the new traffic hazard but otherwise unimpacted. Until about 8 weeks after the gates appeared, when suddenly monsters started spewing out of them. Basically, the gates are the launch of an invasion. The attackers have created these kinds of pocket spaces, and filled them with monsters. There's an anchor inside that seems to gather energy for however long it takes (depending on the size of the pocket space, or something like that), and then opens the Earth-side gate so all the monsters can pour out. The monsters seem to be the first wave of invasion, softening up the planet before the aliens arrive to conquer. At the start of the book, this has been going on for 10 years, with humanity fighting to stop the incursions. They're stopped by sending a team into the gate and destroying the anchor before it can finish charging, so the monsters never get released onto Earth. Though the team has to fight through said monsters to get to the anchor, so it isn't exactly a walk in an alien park.

Two other things have kept humanity from outright losing this war.

1 - After those first gates popped open, some humans spontaneously developed superpowers. The world now calls those people Talents. Talents are widely varied - some people have combat talents, some have healing talents, some have cool utility talents like the ability to dowse for useful ores, etc. Which leads us to ...

2 - We realized these pocket spaces are filled with useful things that can really up our game, stuff like rare metals, plants that have advanced our healing, etc.

So now the mission each time a gate appears is two-fold. Mission 1 is sending a combat team in to shatter the anchor, and mission 2 is sending a foraging team in to grab up whatever good things are in the pocket space before it folds.

Our FMC Ada is an Assessor Talent - she can look around a space and spot the usefulness of everything in it (like, she sees them glow in colors - yellow is dangerous, red is useful), and additionally she can look at a thing and immediately know its use (like, this plant will make a super advanced medicine, this ore is unbreakable). She's part of the foraging mission, obviously.

Anyway, things go to shit in the current gate dive, and the book is Ada and her dog (Bear) trying to survive in this alien cave system and find the way out, even as the whole experience is changing them on a fundamental level.

At first I thought Ada had a kind of lame superpower, but let me tell you, in a survival situation, that's the best power to have. She could instantly know that this is safe to eat, this plant has pollen that will kill us if we breathe it, etc. Of course, she'd still die without some combat ability, but as I said, their time in this gate - their exposure to things - evolves both Ada and Bear pretty dramatically.

I really loved the book, and I'm so thrilled that the authors have said there will definitely be a sequel - there's so much left to do and explore in this world, it feels like we've barely gotten started! Also, Ada barely gets to meet the person I assume is the MMC (Elias), so there's that to look forward to. And I can't wait to see how Ada keeps all the ways she has changed secret. It would also be a shame for her to go back to a simple government Assessor job - I want to see her be the badass she has become!

However, this book has a satisfying ending, so even though it will likely be a long wait to book 2, we're not left dangling. ...more

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