Book Description
Meet Mel: Business owner. Dedicated mom. Natural-born Amazon.
It's been ten years since Melanippe Saka left the Amazon tribe in order to create a normal life for her daughter, Harmony. True, running a tattoo parlor in Madison, Wisconsin, while living with your Amazon warrior mother and priestess grandmother is not everyone's idea of normal, but Mel thinks she's succeeded at blending in as human.
Turns out she's wrong. Someone knows all about her, someone who's targeting young Amazon girls, and no way is Mel going to let Harmony become tangled in this deadly web. With her mother love in overdrive, Ms. Melanippe Saka is quite a force...even when she's facing a barrage of distractions -- including a persistent detective whose interest in Mel goes beyond professional, a sexy tattoo artist with secrets of his own, and a seriously angry Amazon queen who views Mel as a prime suspect. To find answers, Mel will have to do the one thing she swore she'd never do: embrace her powers and admit that you can take the girl out of the tribe...but you can't take the tribe out of the girl.
Book 1 in The Amazon Series
Review:
AMAZON INK’s premise of modern day Amazons is unique in urban fantasy and perfectly suited to genre. The plot is simple enough, someone is killing young amazons and leaving them for Mel to find. Despite having left the tribe a decade before, Mel is forced to work alongside with the Amazons, and deal with hostility and suspicion from both sides while tracking down a killer who may be targeting her own daughter next.
The idea of Amazons, female warriors from Greek mythology, really appealed to me. Author Lori Devoti took this idea and ran with it incorporating magic, mystical tattoos, female hierarchy, and a few surprise elements that I won’t spoil into her modern Amazons. I’m definitely intrigued with how those surprise elements will play out in Amazon Queen.
I’m sorry to say that I struggled with the length of AMAZON INK. I think the pacing and plot would have both fared better at about half the page length. I found myself getting impatient with Mel and the narrative when it wasn’t moving fast enough. A lot of the emotional issues that Mel was dealing with were rehashed many many times without any sort of resolution or plan to deal with them. So these passages felt tedious to me. Part of me even thinks this story idea might have been better served as a Paranormal YA title with Mel’s daughter Harmony as the protagonist.
Also the romantic elements were practically nonexistent. With an author who started out writing Contemporary Romance, I expected more. I understand that the story line was such that a more significant romance might have felt out of place, but I still missed it.
I’m still giving AMAZON INK 3 bats because the Amazon idea is a great one, and the revelations at the end of this book promise to create a much more complex story in the series overall. It is always challenging to establish a unique world that is distinct from the typical vamps and weres that populate this genre. Lori Devoti does that in AMAZON INK and I’m looking forward to seeing where she takes theses characters in Amazon Queen when it releases on April 27th.
Sexual Content: References to homosexuality.
My Rating (out of 5):
Good - A fun read with minor flaws. Maybe read an excerpt before buying.
Click HERE to read an excerpt of AMAZON INK
Product Details
Mass Market Paperback: 372 pages
- Publisher: Pocket (May 26, 2009)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1439154279
- ISBN-13: 978-1439154274
Disagree with my review? Email me your review for this or any other book I’ve reviewed and I might use it for 2nd Opinion Review
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