YA portal fantasy

Received as a free audiobook in exchange for my honest review. Ember is sixteen years old and on the track team, a normal teenager until a car accident kills her father. In the aftermath, Ember hides in the basement of the coffee shop her father ran, and discovers a portal to another world—Espereva. There, she meets monsters and finds out she has magic, and it turns out her aunt and cousin have hidden things from her.

This book is a pretty typical portal fantasy with a young protagonist finding her way in the world, and with lots of secrets coming to light as she comes into her powers. Among the things I very much enjoyed were the good relationships Ember had with her extended family, viewing her cousin as a sister. Although there is some angst after her father’s death, Amber doesn’t angst much about her powers which is refreshing. A sixteen-year-old gaining magical powers and whining about it? I doubt it. Also, I love that it doesn’t have romance, that the first boy she stumbles on isn’t her fated mate or whatever, and that when faced with a dangerous task, she doesn’t try to fix it all herself—she actually turns to the aforementioned family.

I would have liked a bit more depth to several of the characters. Even the MC falls a bit flat as we are thrown through the adventure and she gains powers at a speed that would make a racehorse jealous. It is an obvious start of a series, as there is a lot about the evil king that hardly goes anywhere in this book, but will be the basis for future books. There are twists and turns, some more obvious than others. There is no cliffhanger, for which I’m grateful.

Overall, I did enjoy it a lot, and the audiobook narrator (Molly Bolton) does an excellent job with different voices and tempo.

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