Mesmerizing - Almost

Mesmer, Book 1: Sanctuary –by Isabella Amaris

Fantasy, Alternate Universe

324 pages

Footnotes/Endnotes: No

Illustrations: No

Suitable for eReaders: Yes (free for Kindle at time of this post)

This is a fast read, the story engrossing enough to keep me reading, though I got a little tired of our heroine, Lea, and her bull headedness.

The story opens with her in the Forbidden Forest, escaping something horrible. She'd been captured and tortured, but we don't know why, nor do we know how she escapes. She is from a country that does not believe in magic, in any form, and finds herself rescued by a young man, Caleb, and taken to the castle of Gabriel, a Magi.

Lea has an over riding urge to flee, to escape, to get back to her country, and she doesn't believe in magic though it stares her in the face every time she opens her eyes. Although I found Lea a bit of a whiner and brat, I admit I enjoyed the story, over all.

I hurried to the end, to find out what she escaped from, how, and why she needs to return to her kingdom immediately, if not sooner only to be left with a cliffhanger ending and none of my questions answered.

This is the first of a trilogy, and I will get the second book; however, I think if the book ended with the answer to some of our questions, and the positing of others, rather than a cliffhanger, I would have liked it better.

The characters are moderately interesting, the world moderately intriguing. I will probably get book 2, but if my questions aren't answered, at least to a degree, I'm not sure I'll care about book 3.

For a free book, I'm not complaining about the price. And what the heck, it's calorie-free brain candy;-)