The Sin Eater's Daughter by Melinda Salisbury

So... I'm new at this.. I've been wanting to create a blog for awhile for book reviews, and I was pulled to create one after reading The Sin Eater's Daughter by Melinda Salisbury.
Here goes:
The Sin Eater's Daughter follows the story of Twylla, her mother is a literal "eater of sins". When someone dies, she goes to their funeral, and eats a bunch of food to cleanse them from their sins so they can get into the Eternal Kingdom. Twylla was prone to this destiny until the queen came to her when she was young and told her that the 'Gods' have claimed she is what's called Daunen Embodied and is to marry the prince. So Twylla is told that she must drink poison during the Telling, the poison doesn't kill her, but instead goes to her skin; so whomever she touches will die instantly. To get this penalty, one must commit treason against Lormere (the nation) or the royal family. Because of this, Twylla has no friends, everyone is terrified of her. The one friend she had, 'committed treason' and she had to kill him.
So, as the story goes on, Twylla gets a new guard (she always has two guards with her). This guard, Lief, tries to befriend her. Twylla's second guard is stung by a bee and dies after weeks in an infirmary.
**SPOILER**
Lief ends up being the sole guard of Twylla, and he earns her trust. Once her trust has been earned, he starts telling her that the poison she is being told to drink, isn't even poison at all, and he proves it at the next Telling. He convinces her that she is not a murderer by touching her, then kissing her, and he never died. So they fall in love. In the end, they plan to run away together to Lief's home country.
This plan of theirs unravels when the prince, Merek, moves up the wedding date. During the feast to celebrate this announcement, the King loses control of his limbs and ends up dying, from poison. Merek tells Twylla his mom, the Queen, was the one to poison him, so she could marry Merek. Yes, the Queen wanted to marry her son. (There's a lot of incest in the royal family.) So Twylla agrees to marry Merek the next night secretly, so Merek and Twylla could rule. That night, Lief visits Twylla, to sleep with her as they do every night, and the Queen comes and finds them in bed together and arrests them. Twylla and Lief are sent to the prison cells to await a trial. While waiting, Twylla discovers the Queen's motive, to start a war with another country, and she calls for Merek to reveal this to him.
During the trial, Merek calls his mother out and they sentence her to death for treason. Before she leaves the room she yells at Lief to tell Twylla who he was. He eventually has to tell Twylla and Merek that he was paid by the Queen to seduce Twylla, so she could die without an uprising, and the Queen could marry Merek. Twylla's heartbroken, Merek still wants to marry her, and they banish Lief from Lormere. It basically ends with Twylla in solitude continuing life.


To me, this book was very unoriginal. In fact, I felt that the plot was the same as the Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard. The story was very dull until the last one hundred pages. The whole book was predictable. Girl forced to marry prince, girl falls in love, girl gets betrayed, the queen is the bad guy. There was no surprise element for me at all. Even the most creative minds will question "How is it that the royal family can touch a girl with poisonous skin, yet no one else can?" Everything that happened was foreshadowed.
Normally, I would feel as if I needed to read the second book to see if the series got better. But, with this book, I don't think I will. While Salisbury writes very well, I just can't get over how overused this plot is in the Young Adult world right now.


I would give this book a 2/5 stars.