Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things

by Martina McAtee

 

After years of watching her father be a barely functioning drunk, Ember must now attend his funeral and try to put the broken pieces of her life together. She's pretty much felt like she was on her own for most of her life, so this really isn't much of a change.

 

What is a change is the strange boy who seems to be everywhere watching her. Also strange is the appearance of twins who show up and take her to a tiny town in Florida, telling her that she is their cousin who was thought to be dead for the last 12 years. Now she's living with them, a pack of werewolves, and a fae.

 

Another change is the fact that she can now raise the dead, speak with the souls of the departed, and her cousins are a reaper and a banshee.

 

People want her power. People definitely don't want her to have her power. Ember and her cousins are at the center of a dangerous plan hatched generations before and now coming to fruition.

 

If she can survive it, she may become the most powerful person ever to have walked the earth.

 

Final thoughts: This thing just kept going and going and going and dragging and dragging and dragging. It was so frustrating because I kept having to put it down and pick it back up again. Only near the end did I finally look up the number of pages (having been reading the Kindle edition with only percentages listed), and I found that this thing is 508 pages. While the author is pretty good at showing and not just telling, this showed way too much and kept meandering around. Additionally, and this is a personal thing of mine, ::SPOILER ALERT:: the three death cousins are reincarnations of The Morrigan, a trio of goddesses. But one of the cousins is male. How does the author work that? She makes him gay. As if being gay makes him automatically more feminine/effeminate. That's really rude and definitely not accurate. More accurately, it's stereotyping and judgmental. 

 

Not reading the next one. Not caring one bit.

 

Rating: 2/5