Review ~ Scent of Magic (Healer #2) - Maria V. Snyder

ARC received via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review

Publisher: Mira
Released: 4th Jan 2013
ISBN: 1472009886

Description

Hunted, Killed—Survived?

As the last Healer in the Fifteen Realms, Avry 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, Avry 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, Avry 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 Avry is alone. Unless she figures out how to do the impossible ... again.

My Opinion
I'm sad to say I did not finish this book. I gave it a good go and tried to stick with it but after I had forced myself to get to 54% I just couldn't read anymore so this is by no means a review of the book, just my thoughts on why I could not continue it.

The main things I didn't like about this novel was for one there were no chapter headings. I know I have a ARC copy so it may be lacking in formatting  editing etc but I thought the book would at least be sectioned into chapters. This made it incredibly hard to read as there were no obvious breaks which allowed me to come to a natural pause while reading. It just seemed to drag on and on and I was waiting for a break that never arrived. As well as this the constant switching of character's POV and the person in which the book was written in was irritating. I have read a few books have done this successfully but most signify the change either through titles, breaks or some other form of sign. This book did none of this and instead jumped right from one character to the other leaving me confused which in turn lead me to backtrack to see if I had missed something (may be down to arc copy I don't know). It was made all the more difficult by Kendrick being in a totally different setting as it did not relate well to the main first person section.

In the end it was the jumpy style of writing that switched between person, POV and setting, the lack of headings to form breaks and annoying nicknames (Poppa bear/The Monkeys) which sounded like they belonged in a children's fairy tale rather than YA a fantasy book that lead me to lose interest and not be able to finish this book. I do however love the cover.