Amber Smoke

Book: Amber Smoke
Author: Kristin Cast
Series: The Escaped Book 1
Publisher: Diversion Publishing
Release Date: June 9th, 2015
Pages: 275 pages

Price At Amazon: e-book 9.99, Paperback 12.33!  To me this is totally an over inflated price for her first Solo book.  I totally regret spending my 9.99 on it!

What I Gave It:  2 Stars

Covers: While this cover to the left is for the paperback & e-book version (I purchased, and read the e-book version) is OK, its just nothing special.  It didn't really evoke any want in me to read the book.  Having hit the audible button on its amazon page later I was disappointing at the paperback cover.  I absolutely love the audible cover!  It makes me want to listen to the story, or read it.  Even  though there not really that different, it does make a difference to me.  I wish the e-books would have had the audible cover  : (   I'll posted both so feel free to make your own decisions!

My Summary:  Maiden one of the three furies (crone, and mother being the other two) makes a huge mistake by having a love affair with an inmate of Tartarus.  A curse is somehow (wasn't explained) set in place because of this affair.  The curse ended up releasing some inmates (evil souls) of Tarturas allowing them to break through to the mortal world.  As the curse continues all of Tartarus will devolve leaving all its evil souls to break through to the mortal world, to cause hell on earth.   Maiden being the reason the curse its there calls on Hera who magically makes Maiden with child.  This child becomes Alek who is the "Warrior of Tartarus," destined to save the world.  Eva is brought into play because she is the descendant of Pythia the Oracle of Delphi.  Eva is destined to help Alek break the curse, and maybe be the love of Alek's life!  Who knows.  Alek must unlock Eva's oracle powers so that they together can end the curse by capturing the evil souls of Tarturas who escaped.  Well basically that is most of the plot, you'll have to read the book to find out the rest!    

My Thoughts: My feelings after reading this book are mixed, but mostly I think that this book is a failure at what ever it was trying to be. Its kind of disjointed. It could have be broken up into two parts, or two novella's. The first half creeped slowly on, and I almost didn't finish the book. The second half didn't really get any better with the characters making more stupid decisions, and ended on the hugest cliffhanger I've come across. It was like end of the season episode on a tv drama cliffhanger!

The characters are so immature that you cringe thinking that their world is counting on them. Eva for the most part is a goodie goodie who can do no wrong, and I just couldn't like her. She was not the smartest cookie in the box, and doesn't act rational throughout most of the book. Then we have Alek, yeah cause the furies (mother, maiden, and crone) would name there child Alek! Anyway I got off on a tangent there, sorry. Yes Alek the second main character, and love interest is kind of a douche bad. This might be because he was raised in the underworld, and only visited our world occasionally. He doesn't get the mortal world, and ends up making an ass of himself most of the time.  The language barrier might supposed to have been funny, but it just fell flat for me.  Truthfully his attitude just didn't endear him to me, and I wanted to shove him in front of a bus. The secondary characters were nothing special, and straight out of the HON series. As was the setting, its pretty much and altered setting of the HON series. Don't even get me started on the big bad. OK, well he was probably supposed to be creepy but just ended up not being so.  Also he was really easily defeated by Alek, which just made me wonder why he needs Eva!

There are parallels to the HON series that she co-authored, and similarities that I noticed. Its like she used a formula based on the HON series to write this book. I don't really think this is a compliment. I don't understand why she broke off on her own, only to write something with so many similarity to her co-authored books. I don't think I'll be continuing with this series, because in my experience with series like this they never really get better!

I'd Recommend This Book: Probably to anyone who fell in love with the House of Night Series, loved every book, and worshiped the book shelves they sat on. Otherwise if you found any fault with that series you should probably stay away from this one. Read at your own risk!