The last of my vacation reading is now done in a very enjoyable book by Christina Dodd called Chains of Fire. This is part The Chosen Ones series. The book had a nice complexity to it and I could just gobble up chunks of the book in no time at all.
I picked up the book at Black Bond Books, a really cool chain of independent book stores in the British Columbia area. I love to check out Black Bond Books when I visit my friend. It’s her place of work but it’s neat to see what they feature since they don’t have the same merchandise as the books stores I tend to go to most (Barnes & Noble or Borders). They have a really nice selection of occult/urban vampire books. It just makes narrowing down book selections so much easier.
Sometimes covers don’t always pull in a reader. This book’s cover really doesn’t do the book justice. I almost put the book back since the front cover was just not my alley. Now I enjoy half naked men but that image involved in fire didn’t really make me say, “I want to read this book” since it doesn't tell me much about the book itself. But the back cover interested me since the story line intrigued me. So I figured at worst, I have another embarrassing book to tote around and that didn’t stop me from reading and enjoying the fluff of Gossip Girl and at best there is a new series to get my teeth into.
Fortunately for me this book was delicious. I could just read 50 to a 100 pages in a brief span of time. The book just flowed and it was interesting. I like the aspect of having these abandoned children who had special powers and them trying to balance out good versus evil. Plus underneath all of that, there is a love story between Isabelle and Samuel. The two of them were trapped in Switzerland for a while and had to go into survival mode. No half naked guys in freezing temps and being trapped by an avalanche (other then the one time where they got over their stuff and finally got it together).
There was a believability about all the characters. Even the lesser character tended to have a backstory and bits that just made them rich. There weren’t throw away characters or characters that were just fuzzy in my mind. I had images of how people looked and acted. It was great. I think that’s one of the reasons it read so well.
Only one thing shocked me. That about 200 pages into the book, there was the insertion of several new characters. I wasn’t expecting to have so many new faces just added into the book midway through. But then the character page at the beginning of the book finally made sense. I didn’t think it was quite necessary for the first half of the book since it was predominately Samuel and Isabelle.
Now I want to read the first three books in this series and see where it goes from there. I am curious how the books all interrelate. This book was solid as a stand alone book but at the same time, Dodd set up for at least another book after this book. After reading series like Typhon Pact (where each book is meant as stand alone but tied together by a unified theme) and Destiny (where books are sequential) , I’m curious to see where the Chosen Ones series land since it has traits of both.
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