May 1, 2011

Review: Witch Fire by Anya Bast

Witch Fire (Elemental Witches, Book 1)Witch Fire (Elemental Witches, Book 1) by Anya Bast

Genre: Paranormal Romance

After a chaotic marriage and a rough divorce, all Mira Hoskins wants is stability and normality. But when sexy Jack McAllister enters her life, she discovers that what you want isn't always what you need.

Jack is a powerful witch with the ability to command fire and is anything but normal. As the head of a security detail for The Coven, a national organization that governs national witches, Jack has been assigned to watch over Mira. She is a natural born witch with the ability to call the air. And although she is unaware of her talent, a group of renegade witches has discovered her existence and are determined to steal her power--and her life.



Review:

Years ago I had picked up Witch Blood (book two in the Elemental Witches series), it turned into a great idea. After about halfway through I realized that the sex was too much. My preferences being  a lot of plot with a side of hot sex. So what made me come back to this series? Bast came out with a new series, Dark Magick, that just blew me away. Her new series still had quite a bit of sex, but I also had a lot more paranormal titles under my belt.

The Elemental Witches really has a great idea behind it. Witches take up one element: earth, water, fire, or air. There are evil witches, warlocks, who use other witches as sacrifices to Demons to gain more powers.  The Warlocks have pretty much wiped out the rare Air Witches, so when they find out about Mira they mean business. Mira doesn’t know she’s a Witch, her parents wanting her to live without the fear of being hunted. So not only is Mira unaware of her powers, and the danger she’s in, she has no idea that her parents were really killed by being sacrificed in a circle.

With this great idea behind it there’s clearly potential for a great plot, but it suffers from being tempered by the sex scenes. Every time the plot would pick up a sex scene would just pop up, and then the page count for those scenes just kept going. Steamy scenes would be drug out to the point where I would think, “And moving on from her third orgasm please.”

Mira and Jack had average chemistry to go with their average plot.  Mira’s air magic and Jack’s fire magic are hormone makers when combined and unable to resist the magical pull they tumble into bed together.  Then their struggle of “love” continues from there as they try to realize that they might have real un-magically induced feelings for each other. To be honest the need to jump in bed together because of some magic pull is just way over used.  (Get over it PNR authors, get over it.) At least I got some really awesome banter out of it. 

Witch Fire has a new idea to bring to the overwhelmed genre of Paranormal Romance. Lamentably all of that lovely idea is diluted by an average plot, overdone/lengthy sex scenes, and a so-so love story. Clearly Bast gains more style in her later Dark Magick series, here’s hoping she takes Elemental Witches to that level. (If you’re new to the Paranormal Genre or just thinking about trying it out, this is not the place to start.)

Sexual Content:  Vast amounts of page time for very detailed sex scenes. Did I mention really lengthy sex scenes?



Rating: 2/5- Average/disappointing, library check-out


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Amazon:Witch Fire (Elemental Witches, Book 1)

goodreads:Witch Fire


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