I really enjoyed this book. I thought that the storyline was original and the characters were cool. The ideas and paranormal voodoo in this book is very different to a lot of it's genre.My absolute favourite part was the narrator, Lily Parker. She was so clever and on the ball. Usually authors drop hints through out their writing to foreshadow events that basically mean the ending is predictable and we know things are going to happen long before do. However, in firespell, Lily was so on the ball, she knew things before we did. Even better, she did not tell us those things through her thoughts, Chloe Neill still left them for us to guess. It was brilliant, for once I felt mentally on par with a character.The reason that this fantastic book did not get five stars was because it needed to be at least two hundred pages longer, I wanted more character development, more story development, more world development. I needed to see the relationships between the characters unfurl more. Everything in this book lead up to an end. There were no meaningless conversations that bulked out the book. At first I thought this was a good thing, I got to the nitty gritty of the book and all it's cleverness, but looking back, I feel like I know nothing about the charcters that wasn't necessary to the story. Hopefully in the next book I will get to know them better. Yet, it was still a brilliant book! :) I picked this up because I've read all of the Chicagoland Vampire series and I like how Chloe Neill writes. I knew going in that this was a YA book so I didn't expect it to have the same feel as the other series, but I felt that Firespell was just not on the same level with Neill's other writing. Since this is the first book in the series, it has to give us the backgrounds or at least the motivations of some of the main characters. I feel that this is where the story falls short. We meet Lily who is a teenager getting shuffled to Chicago from upstate New York into what may be one of the most exclusive girl's boarding schools in the US. She knows right away that she doesn't fit in with most of the other girls, as they're mostly from mega-rich families. She does get befriended by a goth-type chick who is one of her suite-mates (no dorms in this school!) and who also has a habit of disappearing at night.We learn that there is way more to St. Sophia's than just being a place for the country's super wealthy and there's some seriously wild things happening with Lily's new friend Scout, too. The problem is that we find out these things in such anti-climactic ways that it just doesn't give us any incentive to continue reading. Most of the characters in this book seem flat and not the multi-dimensional we need them to be to stay interested. The situations they find themselves in and the solutions to them are contrived and anti-climactic. I hate even saying this about a Chloe Neill book, because I love the Chicagoland series, but Firespell really dropped the ball. I may give the next book a chance to see if it gets better, but probably not more than that if it doesn't.
What do You think about Magie De Feu (2012)?
I really enjoyed this book. I thought that the storyline was original and the characters were cool. The ideas and paranormal voodoo in this book is very different to a lot of it's genre.My absolute favourite part was the narrator, Lily Parker. She was so clever and on the ball. Usually authors drop hints through out their writing to foreshadow events that basically mean the ending is predictable and we know things are going to happen long before do. However, in firespell, Lily was so on the ball, she knew things before we did. Even better, she did not tell us those things through her thoughts, Chloe Neill still left them for us to guess. It was brilliant, for once I felt mentally on par with a character.The reason that this fantastic book did not get five stars was because it needed to be at least two hundred pages longer, I wanted more character development, more story development, more world development. I needed to see the relationships between the characters unfurl more. Everything in this book lead up to an end. There were no meaningless conversations that bulked out the book. At first I thought this was a good thing, I got to the nitty gritty of the book and all it's cleverness, but looking back, I feel like I know nothing about the charcters that wasn't necessary to the story. Hopefully in the next book I will get to know them better. Yet, it was still a brilliant book! :)
—hnm114
This was a fast and entertaining read. It reminded me a lot of the books I used to read (and love) when I was 12-13, and I feel this was actually the target audience, for it's a book that concentrates in fast action and lacks character development. I thought about rating it 2 stars, but that wouldn't have been fair. For what it is, it's a pretty good book, it's just not very inviting when you're 25. Still, I might pick up Hexbound sometime later. It seems like a great in-flight read.
—Jackie_xo28
It took a super long time to get to the actual plot, but overall this book was really good.
—ktmiller92
