Book Review: Alora by Megan Linski

Amazon Description

For hundreds of years, Alora has been queen. Ruling over the most remote regions of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, she spends her summers riding upon a wild stallion, her winters as a winged wolf, never aging, forever at an eternal sixteen.

This is what it means to be an Anmortal.

Centuries pass until the arrival of something new in the woods, a small boy named August. Alora watches through the years as the child grows into a young man. Slowly she finds herself falling for him, unable to tame her wild heart. Madly in love, she ignores the fact that humans and Anmortals can never be together...a mortal cannot love a creature that lives forever.

Distracted by romance, Alora doesn’t notice that there is a monster lurking in the shadows, a hunter who is determined to make Alora his prize. With no time left to run and no way out, Alora is about to make the most challenging decision of her life. What's more important...her true love, or her freedom?

Review

I snagged up an ebook copy of Alora on my Kindle after I did an interview with the author Megan Linski. You can find that interview HERE. 

After reading the description, I was very excited to get into this. I was intrigued by the idea of the Anmortals; not only beautiful with eternal souls, but a second form for half the year. Alora's animal form was a majestic wolf with white swan wings. Not only can she roam the frosty terrain of Michigan's upper peninsula, but she can fly over the great lakes as well. Oh! And when she is human in the summer, she rides around the forest on her horse companion, Tanglemane! Pretty cool, right?

I just wish there had been more of them. As far as Anmortals go, Alora is pretty much it. There is one short flashback to her days with her Anmortal family, but that only left me wanting more. At first, Alora was not a character I could connect with easily. Because of her Anmortal status, she is gorgeous, unbreakable, overconfident, and a teensy bit arrogant. Basically flawless. She spends nearly a century wandering around by herself, away from humans and modern society. 

Until she meets a boy. 

For the first half of the book, the only real characters in the story are Alora and August. During the phase where they fell in love, the tantalizing descriptions kept me reading, but not much else. I felt like I my arm was brushing against pine needles and it was my toes that were squishing mud between them. But I just wish there had been some other characters, conflict, something....

Luckily, right smack dab in the middle of the book, things got interesting. FAST. Alora was thrown out of her element and into a world with technology and crowds of the humans she had stayed far away from her whole life. I actually remember the exact second I sat up and was like,"Yes! Okay, this is getting good." From there on out, the story was chuck full of character development, hard choices, a few twists, and a nasty villain. Linski breaks down her flawless character to the bottom of a soggy pit so that she can attempt to claw her way out. I very much enjoyed her journey and the peculiar relationship she develops with the antagonist. The ending had just the right amount of suspense and drama. I only wish somehow the beginning of the book could have somehow been more exciting like this!

I worry that some readers with less patience and less appreciation for elegant descriptive writing will give up on this daring story. Alora has shown me that sometimes it takes time to build up to something worth while. I was very happy I finished this book, but because of the slow pace for the first half, I am giving this book 3.5 stars. However, this book has plenty of 5 star reviews, so you may enjoy it more than I did overall. Megan Linski's next book, Kingdom From Ashes is set to release May 22. The description, which can be found on Goodreads, sounds very promising and the book already has 5 star reviews.

****

3.5 Stars