Her best friend is a demon. Her older sister is the town's infamous spider witch. And she's pretty sure the beautiful gorgon she accidentally tripped in the hallway hates her.
As the only human in her high school, Anastasia Graves is used to not fitting in. Despite being adopted by a family of powerful witches, she isn't sure what she's going to do with her future. Her classmates all have special powers, which makes getting ahead kind of tough.
When she's assigned her group for senior projects, she doesn't feel much better. Among the others in her group are a siren with no voice, a necromancer who can't control her powers, and a son of the Fates whose visions of the past and future are always wrong.
Once she finds out their special assignment is to go to the human world, however, Anastasia starts to feel a little more interested. This interest soon turns to terror when she realizes they've stumbled straight into a plot to take over an entire town. The only trouble is, the one seemingly behind the plot isn't from the human world—and it's someone who seems to have a special distaste for Anastasia.
Before they know it, Anastasia and her group of misfits find themselves trying to save the town and uncover the mystery they've been thrown into... and hoping to make it out alive.
There are two good stories here: one, the mystery that needs to be solved, and two, a journey of self-discovery. The book does a good job at switching between these two plots with a good mix of humor and serious moments. As I've come to expect from books by this author, the character stories are important and meaningful. Not only does the main character get her time to shine, but we get a glimpse of the others as well. The main group of characters are all outcasts of sorts and through the book struggle to find their strengths and sense of worth, and it was nice to see how they ended up doing so. The main character has a particularly emotional journey, and it took me by surprise by very suddenly going in a different direction than I thought. It was jarring and I suspect purposefully so, and it did it well.
Along with the characters trying to find their confidence they're also trying to solve a plot that has dire ramifications. The mix of personalities is great for storytelling purposes here. The reveal at the end wasn't too hard to figure out, but it was all done satisfyingly enough to keep things interesting. The book takes some time here and there for the character to have some time with her thoughts, but I never felt bored, especially near the end. I also never felt too dragged down by any low points, as there was always some humor or optimistic note to bring things back up before it got discouraging. The characters are smart and empathetic even when they clash and I liked watching them deal with conflict both between themselves and against the antagonist.
Overall the main story was solid, though I hope in future books we'll get more of a glimpse of the magical world the main characters live in. I'd always like to see more magic. The character stories were compelling and emotional and some of my favorite parts of the story, much like most other books by this author.
I look forward to future books in this series, and in the meantime this was a solid and enjoyable start.
I won this book from a Goodreads giveaway. Definitely not what I was suspecting but the book was very good. The characters had depth and a lot of background despite being from only one point of view, you see a lot of the other charecters. All of the people in this story showed major character development especially the main charecter. The book was mainly finding identity with mystery woven in it. I did like the ending, I felt like it resolved the book really well.
This was everything I needed and wanted right now. By now I know any Solo book is going to have some GREAT character stories and I wasn't disappointed. I wasn't honestly expecting almost everyone to get a story but they did. The main character has a heart wrenching arc herself but everyone else gets their time too and it just made me fall in love with all of them.
The main plot was interesting and while the end wasn't a huge surprise it was still pretty satisfying. I like a good mystery. There was also the romance, and it was kind of light but also explicit and also closer to a hate to love than i ever thought I would get lol. I'm going to need the next book to have much more but the setup was good.
Long story short! Amazing character stories, maybe some of the best since the Ghost Walk books. A good mystery, the beginnings of an almost hate to love romance, magic and cool mythological monster type people, anddd a really cool start to a series I'm pretty sure I'm going to love.