Perfekt Balance (The Ære Saga Book 3‪)‬

Akind heart can brighten the darkest realm...and brighten our day too!

"A kind heart can brighten the darkest realm"... and there is no kinder heart in all the Realms than the one belonging to our heroine Elsa Fredriksen.
Having survived the drama of Perfekt Control and Freya's rescue from the frozen wastes of Hel, our beloved Norse crew are looking forward to a few moments of peace and down-time. Elsa, High Healer of Asgard is tasked with the additional quandry of figuring out how to be an effective Unifier in order to pass that knowledge on to her brother's girlfriend Mia before Ragnarok descends. Forse Styrke, God of Justice (and Elsa's long-time friend and even longer-time crush) is on hand to help, but his mixed signals and reluctance to commit to a relationship with our girl is a distraction Forse is not willing to face and Elsa struggles to understand.

When Runa - a fugitive at the top of Asgard's Most Wanted list is sighted, Tyr calls the crew in to go and retrieve her from Svartalfheim where she has apparently been harboured by Dark Elves. Against Forse's better judgement, Tyr insists that Elsa go along as Unifier to keep the peace during the handover. However, nothing is ever simple and what should have been a straight-forward mission quickly goes south with potentially devastating repercussions.

S.t Bende is a storyteller with an uncanny gift for drawing her readers into the story, almost as if they too are an unseen part of the plotlines rather than just as onlookers. Her characters have great depth and she is not afraid to show their flaws and weaknesses as well as their strengths. The Aere Saga progresses from strength to strength as each book is completed, moving the story along at a fast pace, without leaving the reader feeling that it has been rushed or parts of it glossed over. We see the story unfold through the eyes of Elsa, Forse, Tyr, Brynn, Henrik and Mia - characters we have all grown to adore right from the get-go, yet what impresses more is the way in which S.t Bende manages to slip at least 2-3 new characters into the story, delivering hints and plot twists to suggest the importance of their future parts to play in the saga as a whole. Her characterisation of the somewhat villainous (yet also possibly somewhat misunderstood) Runa is masterfully woven - the reader cannot deny the wickedness, but at the same time we find ourselves striving - like Elsa - to find some good in her.

Perfekt Balance is much grittier than it's predecessors, but don't let that put you off. From the start of the saga, we are warned that Ragnarok has been prophesied and is going to be bad news for all concerned one way or another when it comes. Some will rise and some will fall, yet even at it's darkest ebb, there is always a positive path to be seen and that is the thing that is perhaps most attractive about S.t. Bende's books.... there is always hope, even when things seem almost impossible.

I have loved all of the books in the Aere Saga so far, but this one is in my honest opinion the best that S.t. Bende has written to date. It is obvious to see just how thoroughly she has researched Elsa's gifts of healing and unifying and she manages to explain the processes in simple terms rather than "blind her readers with science or spiritual jargon" Elsa speaks to me on so many levels and I sobbed my heart out at the beauty of the epilogue. Perfekt Balance is a book to be enjoyed over and over and definitely not to be missed.