Review of Wildfire by Deb Ellen

I received a free e-galley in exchange for an honest review, thank you to Deb Ellen and the NerdFam.

CW’s: Violence, gore, grievous bodily injury, sexual content, parental death, parental alienation.

My Rating: 2.75 stars

Okay, from the jump, I was actually engaged. Sure, the formatting was a bit odd on my device, because of how PDF’s show up on Kindle (and allowing the format to be changeable when you upload it to Kindle messes with chapter layouts, whatever).

But formatting issues aside, the book was off to a good start. I liked the writing style, the narration, and the portal fantasy aspect of this book.

I do think there is definitely an aspect of this book that’s corny and clichéd, which, with the genre, is close to being a given.

I think the premise is interesting, and the portal fantasy aspect works nicely. But there isn’t a lot of uniqueness to it. Same old same old of a magical land with fae and other creatures. There wasn’t mich that was new in it. But I think it’s pretty difficult to be original with books anymore.

I do think there’s a unique element with the family dynamic. There’s this estrangement on multiple sides between her and her parents and her and her brother. it added an interesting element and I did feel like it was well done. It does feel like the sibling dynamic was written realistically and by someone who has a sibling or knows how they are.

Again, there is just some cliché aspect of the plot that doesn’t feel super original. And the sex scenes leave a lot to be desired. There’s definitely a compelling aspect to it, but it’s more similar to reality TV or a CW show than anything else. Which doesn’t mean it’s not as addicting, but I do think the quality does match it. And that does match it.

Honestly, the more the book progressed, the less interested I became. It seemed a huge chunk of this book was either sex scenes, Evie arguing with her love interest Kit, a bunch of different people with varying degrees of weird names with little personality. And honestly fairly boring world development. I think this book could have been really good if there had been more fleshing out of the world, the characters, and the plot. I think there was a lot of promise in this book and it just…missed a mark.

But god, I just wanted to shake Evie so bad. I wanted to throttle her. She was just SO stupid and reckless and annoying sometimes. She didn’t make any sense with her decisions half of the time. It was…aggravating.

I also had a hard time seeing the “bad guys” as anything but flat, cartoonish, and one-dimensional. There just wasn’t enough time devoted to development of these characters, the magic system, and the world. And that meant everything suffered and nothing really made complete sense.

It was also just riddled with clichés. This “chosen one” cliché, the super-special-super-gorgeous FMC who has this secret parent no one will tell her about and this great power that no one else has. And no one else is like her. But she’s, like, spunky and feisty too.

Not a bad book, just…disappointing. I feel like it could’ve been so much more.