My Edition: Kindle Owned
Pages: 265
Series: The Healer #1
Genre: YA, Fantasy
Published: May 31st, 2014 by Beau Coup LLC
Rating: 3 stars
Synopsis
A girl, a prophecy, and two warring gods equals destiny!
Hope Fairmont longs for a normal teenage life, but with a gift like hers, normal equals healing illnesses and injuries instantly. Keeping a secret like that isn’t easy, but a small town is the perfect place for her to heal those who can’t heal themselves, and an even better place for her father, James Fairmont, to hide his daughter from the rest of the world.
Life takes an unexpected turn when two handsome strangers move into town and begin unearthing other secrets concerning Hope’s future and past, revealing to Hope that her gift for healing may be the fulfillment of an ancient, Japanese prophecy gone wrong.
Staying away from these mysterious newcomers would be the smart thing to do, but Victor’s gentle, easy manner, and Tie’s mixed signals and strange mood swings draw her hopelessly closer to revealing the secret she and her father have been so desperate to hide.
Hope’s life is complicated further with visions of a previous life and the arrival of a supernatural demon sent to assassinate her before she learns what she is truly capable of.
With the support of her father, the fiery loyalty of her best friend Angie, and the child-like love of Kirby, a ten-year-old patient, Hope must fight against the forces of a relentless demon god while unwinding the tangled pieces of her past, proving to herself and those she loves that destiny isn’t determined by some cosmic reading of the stars, but by the individual choices one makes.
Review:
I don’t remember having this on my kindle. But I do. Anaya is the next author along my sorted. I have another book by her, My Fair Assassin.
The first chapter gripped me. I liked the story line already and hoped that the rest of the book goes just like the first chapter.
But upon further investigation we have a few tropes played out. Of course it’s YA fantasy so we need
- Heroine with some kind of power
- She has something or someone stalking her
- She can’t tell anyone about her power
- There’s a kid under the age of twelve who talks to old for age
- Slut shaming best friend (Actually this isn’t a big trope but still used)
- New guy/ guys
- Heroine feels magnetic pull to new guys
- love triangle
- Hidden Princess
I do like that it follows Japanese mythology. I haven’t gotten to read anything on Japanese mythology but it does sound similar to the others. Our main bad guy seems to be lord of the land of dead. Amatsu originally looked over souls going into the heavens, but he wanted more power. His rebellion split the heavens, so his punishment was to look over souls in the land of the dead. The kami (lesser gods) that followed him turned into nekomata.
Victor and Tie are the new guys who have interest in Hope. Hope starts finding out that she is apart of a much bigger picture than what she was raised to believe.
This is a book my teen self would have ate up and wanted more. My adult self, not so much. I guess I’m over the whole YA tropes. I have moved on to NA tropes. I liked the premises but the love triangle ruins it for me. If there was no triangle I would probably move on with the series, but I’m just not that interested.
The Kansan Reader 