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A review by erikawastaken
Ignited by Steffanie Holmes
3.0
I don’t know how I feel at the end of this series.
The good:
I have always enjoyed gothic horror and am excited to see the same themes and ideas in modern stories. Also, I appreciate a “bully” romance where there is a reason for the bullying/animosity, yet you can actually understand why it happened and how the heroine could forgive everyone.
I liked the incorporation of Salem and witchcraft. It was a heart blend with the Lovecraftian horror and helped explain the whys.
The meh:
The romance was kind of just blah for me. Like, I never really felt there was anything between the main characters. The guys were fleshed out as the series progressed, but I never really understood why they were so swept up in Hazel or her in them. It made the HEA feel a bit forced, as it often felt like their feelings were situational.
The pacing in the series, and especially this book, was off. Certain things were resolved too quickly, and then other parts just dragged.
The bad:
One thing that makes gothic horror so amazing is the descriptions and mood setting. This series missed that. Outside of the fact, Ayaz smelled like rose and honey, this series just never really did a good job of setting the scene and painting a picture for us. My go-to example of how lacking this is the fact our first uniform description is 50 pages into the second book.
The other clear example is the confusion over Hazel’s race. In book one, there is one line nearly at the end where she refers to her “dark skin,” and in this book, she refers to her hair as “kinky,” but that’s it. While I appreciate not wanting to go into an in-depth description of her skin tone and saving us from a skin color to food/coffee analogy, it always felt like Hazel was stripped of her Blackness, which feels inauthentic and hollow.
Overall the handling of race in this novel is problematic - either the author wrote a poorly developed BIPOC character and defaulted to stereotypes, or she wrote a white girl with dreads that uses some pretty problematic language. It was like the author wanted to infuse race and class into this story but approached it from the “I don’t see color” point of view. A sensitivity reader would have helped this series significantly.
The good:
I have always enjoyed gothic horror and am excited to see the same themes and ideas in modern stories. Also, I appreciate a “bully” romance where there is a reason for the bullying/animosity, yet you can actually understand why it happened and how the heroine could forgive everyone.
I liked the incorporation of Salem and witchcraft. It was a heart blend with the Lovecraftian horror and helped explain the whys.
The meh:
The romance was kind of just blah for me. Like, I never really felt there was anything between the main characters. The guys were fleshed out as the series progressed, but I never really understood why they were so swept up in Hazel or her in them. It made the HEA feel a bit forced, as it often felt like their feelings were situational.
The pacing in the series, and especially this book, was off. Certain things were resolved too quickly, and then other parts just dragged.
The bad:
One thing that makes gothic horror so amazing is the descriptions and mood setting. This series missed that. Outside of the fact, Ayaz smelled like rose and honey, this series just never really did a good job of setting the scene and painting a picture for us. My go-to example of how lacking this is the fact our first uniform description is 50 pages into the second book.
The other clear example is the confusion over Hazel’s race. In book one, there is one line nearly at the end where she refers to her “dark skin,” and in this book, she refers to her hair as “kinky,” but that’s it. While I appreciate not wanting to go into an in-depth description of her skin tone and saving us from a skin color to food/coffee analogy, it always felt like Hazel was stripped of her Blackness, which feels inauthentic and hollow.
Overall the handling of race in this novel is problematic - either the author wrote a poorly developed BIPOC character and defaulted to stereotypes, or she wrote a white girl with dreads that uses some pretty problematic language. It was like the author wanted to infuse race and class into this story but approached it from the “I don’t see color” point of view. A sensitivity reader would have helped this series significantly.