Author:Â Alicia Wright Brewster
Publisher: Dragonfairy Press
Publication Date: April 25, 2013
Genre: Young Adult, Fantasy, SciFi
Pages: 291
Buy: The Book Depository
Book Description:Â The countdown clock reads ten days until the end of the world. The citizens are organized. Everyone’s been notified and assigned a duty. The problem is . . . no one knows for sure how it will end.
Energy-hungry Mages are the most likely culprit. They travel toward a single location from every corner of the continent. Fueled by the two suns, each Mage holds the power of an element: air, earth, fire, metal, water, or ether. They harness their powers to draw energy from the most readily available resource: humans.
Ashara has been assigned to the Ethereal task force, made up of human ether manipulators and directed by Loken, a young man with whom she has a complicated past. Loken and Ashara bond over a common goal: to stop the Mages from occupying their home and gaining more energy than they can contain. But soon, they begin to suspect that the future of the world may depend on Ashara’s death.
First Line:Â “Has it started?”
*Book won through LibraryThings’s Early Reviewer program*
The premise and the cover had me really intrigued and I was so happy to win a copy of this book. This book was enticing from the very start and I was hooked all the way through. The writing style is easy to read and yet complex enough that I didn’t feel like I was reading a young adult novel. (Sometimes you find a good YA but the writing is just too simple for your taste).
What I really enjoyed about this novel is that it felt like a wonderful mix of science fiction and fantasy. I also really liked how it reminded me of Avatar: The Last Airbender but in the future where an Avatar was no longer needed. The description Brewster uses to describes the practitioners was very well done. I was also impressed with the description and creation of the religion seen by the Believers.
I loved the characters and felt attached to many of them. I was sad to see some of them die (especially the ones I really liked). I do have to warn that this book contained gore and while I wasn’t bothered at all it may be a bit too detailed for some people.
The reason that this book won’t get full stars is because I wasn’t sure how I liked Ashara. I felt like at times she was trying to be the strong independent female protagonist that is popular nowadays. But then she’d react in a ‘weak damsel-in-distress’ kind of way in other moments. I felt like her character could have been a bit less squeally or stronger in certain parts.
Overall I really enjoyed this book and would recommend it to fans of science fiction, fantasy and Avatar: The Last Airbender. It was very well done and I plan to go read Brewster’s other works.
My Rating:Â â
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Up next I have A Dark Anatomy by Robin Blake. It’s a library book I borrowed and is due back soon. I also have The Unseen by Heather Graham to read but I’m not sure if I’ll get to it by the time I need to return it, so maybe another time. I also have The Legend of Finndragon’s Curse which was provided to me by the author to review.