Review: MAGIC TO THE BONE

MAGIC TO THE BONE by Devon Monk
Allie Beckstrom Series:
1º. Magic to the Bone
2º. Magic in the Blood
3º. Magic in the Shadows
4º. Magic on the Storm
5º. Magic at the Gate
6º. Magic on the Hunt

Roc Publishing

PLOT

Set in a magical analog of Portland, Ore., Allie Beckstrom is a Hound, able to trace a spell back to its caster. When a young boy is injured by a spell, Allie tracks it back to her estranged father, Daniel, a ruthless businessman who protests his innocence. Then someone magically disguised as Allie kills Daniel. Allie and sexy corporate operative Zayvion race against time to find the answers. Magic is common in this alternate universe, but using it always incurs a physical or mental cost, rendering it a commodity to be bought and sold, used and abused.

Other review(s) of this book: Review by Cherry

REVIEW
To start, the book has an awesome cover and it attracts since the first moment. Besides, the fantastic alternate world created by Devon Monk in Portland and where magic flows is controlled by Beckstrom Enterprises, whose owner is Allie’s father, who Allie doesn’t see seven years ago.

Allie can control the magic, make spells and that makes her a Hound, follow the trace of the bad spell makers. Also she has a little secret: she’s able to save magic inside of her unlike another people who get it around the city or magic storms. Fewer people have tried saving magic in little or huge quantities inside themselves without success, causing be almost dead.

The life of Allie is too much current: she lives in a flat with a stink smell and she hardly achieves pay the rent. All this is because of she doesn’t charge anything for her job to poor people as her and she does receives the physical consequences of her magic acts, unlike the rest of people, who deviate them to innocent people. She suffers horrible headaches and her body is full of bruises and burns.

It’s in her twenty-fifth birthday when a apparently dead young boy and a cat come into her life and it starts a story with a stream of violence, action, attraction, fear and magic. Everything will complicate until the point her life is in danger. She’ll count on help along the path but her bad experiences will make her doubt almost all of them. ¿Will she does the things right trusting in them?

The Plot is good. Good people like her helping to the others with magic and bad people taking advantage of the rest of people. Descriptions of places and how the magic has influenced on them are things that introduce you in the story quickly. A same old friend and an “I-am-different-mood” boy will make the character go on. The friend helps her with transcendental topics about her life and what to do with it, and the boy saves her constantly, something unusual in Allie’s life, and steals her heart. Also there is a young boy able of do incredible things with the magic and makes Allie find out what she didn’t know she will be able of.

The book is full of slow and rapid moments, appropriate and well-distributed to any story, without neither suffers ups and downs nor destroys the narrative thread. Just when we get to the end, we look forward to have near the next book for not losing any detail.

It seems to me a fantastic story. What I find remarkable is the strength that irradiates Allie, even in the worst moments, when she can’t stand or move and whoever will give up, she try to get up and fights.