Book 1 in the Elemental Trilogy
AUTHOR: Sherry Thomas
PUBLISHED: September 2013
CATEGORY: YA
GENRE: Fantasy, Adventure
PREMISE: Iolanthe gets mixed up into politics when her elemental powers get discovered.
MY REVIEW: You ever have one of those books where you wish you could give it a higher rating, but can't really because of quality level? This is me and Burning Sky. On one hand, it's awesome having more fantasy. I always want to give fantasy authors extra points because coming up with fantasy worlds is freaking HARD. Seriously, try it sometime, it's hard. I am working on one right now and I haven't even begun the actual writing part of the story and I started about six months ago (hence why my reviewing here has been funky as of late).
But...this is a very paint by numbers sort of fantasy? The writing is...average and does a lot of telling instead of showing. A lot of the things that happen are things I've seen done in other fantasy books (complete with the girl passing as a boy in a boys school). Characters weren't terribly complicated. Stuff was... predictable if you've read a lot of fantasy. Maybe stuff will ramp up in book two but honestly this one was a bit...dull, I'm sorry to say. It doesn't help that it drags in the middle. I'm pretty sure you could have cut a hundred pages and nothing would have been lost.
It saddens me, because I have a feeling this could have been much better if there had been more editing/polishing of the story. Unfortunately, taking time with stories seems to be a thing of the past in the publishing world.
WHO SHOULD READ: fantasy fans
MY RATING: Three and a half out of Five elemental powers
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