REVIEW: From Blood and Ash

So this one caught my eye when perusing YA romantic fantasy titles for some market research, and the blurb convinced me to give it a shot. I, like many others, had thought it was a standalone, but no such luck. Still, I was waiting on my copy of Finale to arrive, so I figured I'd breeze through it.

Poppy is a sheltered ward of the crown, raised as a sacred icon (the Maiden) to the mysterious religion that surrounds a tier of immortalized humans called the Ascended. Abused by her keepers and trained in secret by the captain of her personal guard, she lives her life balancing on the knife-edge of other people's expectations. Outside the palace walls, the zombie-like Craven threaten every island of civilization, with their puppet-master "the Dark One" supposedly pulling the strings from the crumbled remnants of an opposing nation's throne.

When the Dark One's malicious agents fumble an attempt to kidnap the famous Maiden, an irresistibly handsome and shamelessly charming young soldier named Hawke is assigned to her detail. You can guess where the story goes from here.

From Blood and Ash starts out with a definitively erotic tone and then immediately falls into 150 pages of redundant slog. Once you soldier past that, the pace picks up again and Hawke enters the picture. Looking back, not a whole lot actually happened in this book until the last few chapters, but you get a good bit of romance in between. This is a pretty steamy book. Though the smut is top-notch, a lot of other aspects fell too far short for me to want to continue this series. My main complaint was that I closed the final chapter feeling... confused. Poppy's emotional whiplash made my neck hurt. "Remember this," he said. "Remember this was real." But does she? Nope.