Review: Amber Smoke by Kristin Cast

“I just couldn’t deal.  I found this full of badly done cliches and I wanted a bomb to fall and kill them all.”
~ Under the Covers

I’m going to give it to you straight.  I picked up this book for two reasons.

1.  The blurb sounded interesting.
2. As much as I was skeptical because I DNF the series Kristin Cast has co-written with her mom because the characters made me STABBY, I wanted to explore Kristin’s writing solo to see how much of that was her in that series.  I’ve read P.C. Cast before and have enjoyed her books in the past.  So this was my experiment.

IT FAILED!  Miserably.  It pains me to have spent the time I did reading this.  Hours of my life I’ll never get back.  Yes, the things that bothered me about the dialogue in the House of Night series were exactly the things that I couldn’t get past in this one.  Well, one of the things… the characters and the confusing world and mythology, the cliches, the insta-love, the list goes on.

So we have two parallel worlds, the mortal one and Tartarus.  The three furies and the maiden, and now their son Alek.  When it’s time to save the world of the evil set loose on it, our only hope is an untested young warrior and a human.  I could’ve been behind the warrior idea and if the human had been kick ass, yes that would’ve been cool.  But Eva… just ….. Ugh.  And Alek… just …. blah.

I’m not sure who the target audience for this would be, but I  know it’s not me.  The book lacked depth in plot and world building, the writing was very flowery, the dialogue and the characters made me STABBY!  I can probably say this is so much worst than where I left off the House of Night.  And I feel terrible saying that about anyone’s baby (aka book and work).  I honestly could’ve easily DNF this but I wanted to see how it would end.  And guess what?  There’s no resolution, just a stopping point on sort of a cliffhanger that leaves you having to read book 2.  Well, THAT’S not happening.

Let me back up a bit because while all this paranormal stuff is happening (that was already kind of a spotty plotline and not very well developed) there is also a serial killer on the loose in the human realm, so we get the POV of the police searching for this killer.  How many things did we need to have thrown in one story that was already not very well tied together?  And lets not forget the best friend sidekick with a cookie cutter personality (and by cookie cutter I mean everything I don’t like from the YA snarky spoiled little rich girl friends rolled together).  Just STOP!!!

I just couldn’t deal.  I found this full of badly done cliches and I wanted a bomb to fall and kill them all.  If this was the only hope the world had, we could probably use starting over in a fresh one.

[about-author author=”Kristin Cast”]

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