Embers & Echoes by Karsten Knight

Publisher’s summary: Ashline Wilde may have needed school to learn that she is actually a reincarnated goddess, but she’s ready to move beyond books. She leaves her California boarding school behind and makes for Miami, where she meets a new group of deities and desperately seeks her sister Rose, the goddess of war. But she’s also looking for love—because even though her romance with Cole had to be snuffed, Ash is a volcano goddess—and she doesn’t get burned.

This sequel to the edgy and action-packed Wildefire continues a fiery drama on an immortal scale.

My take: This book was crazy awesome! And the crazy awesomeness continues all throughout the entire book, which has me in absolute amazement!

If you read Wildefire, then you know that it ended in a way that literally blindsides you! It comes out of nowhere and has you literally falling out of your seat, and has you thinking, “What the heck just happened there? Seriously????” And then the book just abruptly ends that way. Well, luckily, Embers & Echoes picks up from that very exact moment! The whole scene that develops in the very beginning of Embers & Echoes is so freakin' sick!!! It reminded me of why I liked Ash so much because she is one hardcore chick!

One of the many things that make this book so crazy awesome is how many crazy, psychotic evil villains there are! All of the gods in this series are totally crazy, but even in all that crazy you will find that there is a lot more crazy evil than there is crazy good.

It’s not just the beginning of the book that has some amazing, dope scenes. Just like the summary says, Embers & Echoes is action-packed! There’s so much that happens in this book that I couldn’t even begin to tell you how many times I was on the edge of my seat, or how many times I was in utter fascination over what was transpiring on the pages of Embers & Echoes! But the one thing that trumps all the other feelings I had throughout this book, was how many times I was outright pissed off at Karsten Knight. This is one of those books where you feel like the author will not allow you to be happy for any character. Yeah, there are still some happy scenes and a lot of funny moments, but right when you are feeling pretty content with the situation or you are feeling pretty happy with the way the story is headed, Karsten abruptly smashes that happiness into oblivion! I can actually give you the page numbers where Karsten pissed me off and, trust me, I was on twitter right after reading those pages, giving him a piece of my mind!

I can honestly say that my only problem with the book was that several times I had a hard time creating a mental picture of what I was reading. But that one problem was so unbelievably minor, that all the extreme positives almost have me forgetting about that one issue.

There’s a pretty crazy twist near the ending of the book, but it was the actual ending that was purely cruel! But the ending would have been even MORE cruel if Karsten had ended it 5 pages earlier...the place where he was originally going to end the book. THAT would have been insane and he would have had some crazy stalker fans beating down his door to get him to finish those last 5 pages! (Those last pages are the first pages of the next book!) And even though I did get to read those last 5 pages, I will be more than impatiently waiting for the final book, Afterglow, in 2013, and I can hardly wait to see how the story will end!