Shield of Sparrows: My favorite romantasy so far

Shield of Sparrows by Devney Perry

Shield of Sparrows came out this year, 2025, and is already in development as a feature film, so I guess Devney Perry, who sold about a million romance novels before this one, knows what she is doing. I’m exaggerating. It isn’t a million books, only fifty. This book is a romantasy—a romance novel set in a second world. It’s not my go-to genre, but I enjoy them now and then, and I would say this is my favorite romantasy so far.

Let me quickly run through the romantasy tropes you can expect here: enemies-to-lovers, the arranged marriage, forbidden love/wrong lover, secrets-and-lies. Now let me run through the fantasy tropes you can expect: secret magic; monsters; political intrigue, and a magical pet.

Odessa Cross is the oldest child of the King of Gold in the kingdom of Quentis. She is ignored and dismissed in favor of her younger half-sister Mae, who is destined to marry the prince of Turah, a country across the strait from Quentis. With her marriage, Mae will become part of an age-old, continent-wide treaty, the Shield of Sparrows. When Mae’s intended and his entourage show up to sign the marriage contract though, by invoking an obscure tradition, the Prince of Turah pulls a switch and insists on marrying Odessa.

In no time, Odessa is swept off to a hermit nation. The omens aren’t good—their ship is attacked by a sea-going monster, a marroweel. Monsters fill this world, on land, in the oceans, and in the air. Looming over everything is an impending migration of winged monsters called the crux. The crux are huge birds, not unlike the roc, with spikes on their wings. A lone crux is terrifying, and can kill or carry off people. The migration includes hundreds of thousands. It’s like when ants invade your kitchen, only they’re sharp-beaked, taloned birds as big as a house. Odessa’s problems are closer to home. Her husband, Zavier, doesn’t speak, and a smirking, arrogant, handsome, magical second-in-command called the Guardian literally speaks for him. Odessa hates the Guardian immediately. She has already been primed to, since the stories of the Guardian portray him as a brutal killer. But it’s more than that. He’s just so sarcastic and hateful with his graceful moves, his quips, his molten glances, his masculine physique, and the way he’s always showing up around her. And the way she always thinks about him. Zavier, on the other hand, is nearly never around, although he provides Odessa what she asks for and, it turns out, will speak to her, although he doesn’t say much.

Devney Perry

Of course the main story is Odessa and the Guardian and the obstacles they face, but there’s plenty else going on. The monsters are wonderful. They are frightening, and beautifully described. More seriously, the attacks from the various creatures are becoming more frequent, more violent—and the monsters seem to be using tactics. While dodging monster attacks and the Guardian’s hot gaze, Odessa wrestles with loyalties, since she is also supposed to be spying for her father. She’s failing that assignment; and Zavier’s father, King Ramsay, is busily burning books, and being caught with a map gets you a death sentence. There is no way to gather the intelligence her father wants.

The secondary characters, like Cathlin and Brielle, are well-drawn. The Guardian is a pretty standard romance love interest, hiding his emotional damage behind his bad-boy façade. The stakes are high and the near-constant monster attacks drive home the question—how can any human settlement survive an attack of thousands of airborne monsters? More seriously, Odessa soon figures out what the Guardian and Zavier already know; the increased intelligence and ferocity of the monsters is directly related to a mysterious disease, which has jumped to humans.

Shield of Sparrows is just over five hundred pages long and ends on a cliffhanger. While I could have skipped about three of the training-montage scenes, the length works, in part because Perry deftly blends romance with suspense and deadly puzzles. A lot is revealed in the final few pages as our lovers are torn from each other one more time.

There are one or two fairly graphic sex scenes in the second half of the book, so I guess it qualifies as “spicy.” [I am editing this to add: the two graphic scenes are short, but vulgar language (two words) are used. According to my go-to resource for romantasy, this is solidly rated “spicy.”]

There are elements of romantasy that I don’t like, and this book is chock-full of them. I don’t love the narrative voice many of these books employ, the immediate first-person voice that could almost be a social media post or a text (I mean no emojis, yet, but close). I find the intrusion of modern slang and names into a so-called second-world that evolved completely separately and apart from ours deeply jarring. This book has a nation named Genesis, and characters named Mae, Margot and Samuel. This isn’t a flaw in the book—these are romantasy conventions. They just don’t work for me. In spite of these (for me) annoying distractions, I’d recommend this book for the action, the monsters, and the intrigue. I may skip the movie, but I will watch for the second book, because I really want to know the answer to Odessa’s questions about her past, her future, and the fate of Turah.