Arc Review: Fire and Bone

Hello people! How are you? And how are your reading going? Today I’m here with the first Arc I’ve read this year. I hope to keep it up and read a lot more of them ( this year I really hope to be better with them!) but hey, just a step at a time! So… here we go with this new review!

Thanks to NetGalley and to the editor. I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Title: Fire and Bone
Author:Rachel A. Marks
Expected Publication:February 20th 2018
Page count:413

“Gossip Girl meets Percy Jackson in the glitz and grit of L.A….”

In Hollywood’s underworld of demigods, druids, and ancient bonds, one girl has a dangerous future.

Sage is eighteen, down on her luck, and struggling to survive on the streets of Los Angeles. Everything changes the night she’s invited to a party—one that turns out to be a trap.

Thrust into a magical world hidden within the City of Angels, Sage discovers that she’s the daughter of a Celtic goddess, with powers that are only in their infancy. Now that she is of age, she’s asked to pledge her service to one of the five deities, all keen on winning her favor by any means possible. She has to admit that she’s tempted—especially when this new life comes with spells, Hollywood glam, and a bodyguard with secrets of his own. Not to mention a prince whose proposal could boost her rank in the Otherworld.

As loyalties shift, and as the two men vie for her attention, Sage tries to figure out who to trust in a realm she doesn’t understand. One thing’s for sure: the trap she’s in has bigger claws than she thought. And it’s going to take a lot more than magic for this Celtic demigoddess to make it out alive. 

 

This is not a meaningful thought, but I love the cover, I like its colors a lot.
Anyway… go with the important stuff, shall we? I changed idea a lot during the reading. And I mean A LOT. I was liking it, then I was quite meh, I disliked it and I was really annoyed with it, I was captivated again, bored again, then I liked it again, then I was waiting for something to really surprise me, then I was disappointed and had mixed feeling all around. It wasn’t easy, really! And now that I have to talk about it I am more confused than ever! I can’t even say if I liked it or not!

To be honest, it is not a bad book, and it has a lot of good things in it, and probably I would read the second book, whenever it would come out, but there are a lot of things that weren’t so good, either.
The author has a lot of potentialities, and I liked her idea a lot. Her world is good and interesting, but I have loved to see more of them. The problem is that the main characters is a stranger to this world and so we learn about it with her, all is new and so there is a fat chance to meet info drops. Lucky for us, we don’t have info drops in this, but the risk is high and so we don’t see a lot of this world. I mean, we have a lot of supernatural creatures going around, and I’d loved to learn more of them, and to see more of them around, but… no such luck!

Also, we have the main characters, Sage, Falean and Kieran that are developed, some of the secondary characters that are not so good but not so bad either, like Lia and the old monk (this one is an interesting character, that’s for sure!) and all the others that are quite plain. It’s not so bad, tbh, but it’s just typical YA book (and here I mean all the YA that are average, not the ones really good, obviously) and it’s a shame, because if she can create the monk, she can create more characters with some depths in them!

The writing is good and I was feeling compelled to go on with the reading even when I was annoyed with it, and even if this first book is more an introductive story than the story itself, it’s full of things, happenings and intrigues.
And we learn about two stories: the story in the present, Sage’s story, and the story in the past, Lily’s. We have two POVs and then we have some parts that are set in the past, but even if this is a past long gone, its echoes aren’t far from our world, and are very important for the present story. I was quite pleased by all of this, so this is the reason for which I would continue this series.

And… we have a love triangle. Sort of. Usually I’m not a big fan, and this would have been reason enough to not continue the series, but, and I know it’s really, really strange, I liked it a lot, and I can’t choose my ship yet, so obviously I have to keep on with the reading, right???

One last thing… the ending. It was mildly disappointing. I mean, I know that this would be the end, I was expecting it and you can see this coming from afar, even if not the motivations maybe, but I didn’t like it a lot. It’s not a bad ending, and it’s also quite right for the story, but I am not satisfied with it.

So… I am still confused about this one, I didn’t dislike it and I didn’t love it, this is clear, but it seems I can’t decide how much I liked it. What I know for sure is that this book makes me want to read some real urban fantasy (as in… adult urban fantasy, or normal urban fantasy… I don’t know which one is correct, but you got the idea, right?), so now I have to go and read it, people! See y’all soon!!!!

And you? Have you read it? Or do you want to read it? 

Happy reading!
S.