Review: SCENT OF MAGIC

Scent Of Magic by Maria V. Snyder
Book 2 of the Healer trilogy
Genre: fantasy
Format: large paperback

About Scent Of Magic:

Hunted, Killed—Survived?

As the last Healer in the Fifteen Realms, Avery of Kazan is in a unique position: in the minds of her friends and foes alike, she no longer exists. Despite her need to prevent the megalomanical King Tohon from winning control of the Realms, Avery is also determined to find her sister and repair their estrangement. And she must do it alone, as Kerrick, her partner and sole confident, returns to Alga to summon his country into battle.

Though she should be in hiding, Avery will do whatever she can to support Tohon’s opponents. Including infiltrating a holy army, evading magic sniffers, teaching forest skills to soldiers and figuring out how to stop Tohon’s most horrible creations yet; an army of the walking dead—human and animal alike and nearly impossible to defeat.

War is coming and Avery is alone. Unless she figures out how to do the impossible ... again.

Source: Info in the About Scent Of Magic was taken from http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16082550-scent-of-magic on 14/12/12.

Review:

I've read this author's Yelena Zaltana trilogy and loved it! However I did not like the Opal Cowan trilogy. So this author has her ups and downs. But one thing remained consistent with her is the compellingness of her author's voice. No matter that the story has gone pear shaped or the character gone stupid, the book would still compel readers to continue reading until the very end. And I think that is where this author's strongest writing feature lies. The weakest is the plot build-up and at times the character development. In this book, the superb story telling quality is apparent. However, we also see a little bit of that character weakness. Additionally, Maria V. Snyder has now adopted the writing style where she goes back and forth between two threads which has the effect of breaking the continuity of the story and jarring me out of the "zone" and yanking me back to reality. And I have to reset my mind-set back to "reading mode" again and this made the pace quite slow. But despite the slower pace, I will still continue reading this series because of the wonderful world building that the world of Avry has! For one, it is simply beautiful! I really like the premise of sentient lilies! For another, Maria V. Snyder doesn't break her own rules. The magic and story line is consistent which I very much appreciated because I find authors who break their own magic rules really annoying! And another reason which makes me continue reading this series is because of the compellingness of the author's voice ... and let's keep our fingers crossed that this series would go more like the Yelena Zaltana way rather than the Opal Cowan way. At the end of it, I enjoyed this book and looking forward to reading the finale of this trilogy!

Empirical Evaluation:
Story telling quality = 5
Character development = 3.5
Story itself = 4
Ending = 4
World building = 5
Plot = 4
Cover art = 3.5
Pace = 3

Overall Rating: 4 out of 5 cherries


Book Trailer:

Author Links:
Maria V. Snyder
Maria V. Snyder at Facebook

Other Links:
www.touchofpowerbooks.com
GoodReads
Mira at Facebook

Thank you to Mira Books for the review copy of Scent Of Magic by Maria V. Snyder received.