Scent of Magic by Maria V. Snyder

Title: Scent of Magic

Author: Maria V Snyder

Series: Healer #2

Genre: Young Adult, Romance, Medieval, Magic, Fantasy

Source: Kindle

Pages: 400 pages

Rating: 4 stars

Available at:

Goodreads • Amazon(.com)

Blurb: (via Goodreads)

As the last Healer in the Fifteen Realms, Avry of Kazan is in a unique position: in the minds of her friends and foes alike, she no longer exists. Despite her need to prevent the megalomanical King Tohon from winning control of the Realms, Avry is also determined to find her sister and repair their estrangement. And she must do it alone, as Kerrick, her partner and sole confident, returns to Alga to summon his country into battle.

Though she should be in hiding, Avry will do whatever she can to support Tohon’s opponents. Including infiltrating a holy army, evading magic sniffers, teaching forest skills to soldiers and figuring out how to stop Tohon’s most horrible creations yet; an army of the walking dead—human and animal alike and nearly impossible to defeat.

War is coming and Avry is alone. Unless she figures out how to do the impossible ... again.

My Review:
I have this thing about sequels, although they are usually well written, I don't usually like them. Especially in the romantic department. Scent of Magic is the sequel to Snyder's Touch of Power, which I will link a description at the end of this review.

Let me start of saying that I LOVED Touch of Power. I loved the dynamic of the love relationship and how it wasn't love at first sight. I am SO SICK of love at first sight. It was something that developed and had its reasons, like a real life situation. But, like all sequels after the couple gets together in the first instalment, you don't see a lot of love between the couple anymore. Usually, some sort of problem develops between the characters. In this case, they simply had to travel apart and thought the other was dead on numerous occasions. That being said, my favourite part of this series is the love aspect, so I was very disappointed that I didn't get to see a lot of it in the sequel.

In Scent of Magic we discover that there is a cure to death essentially. It's much more complex than that and has a bunch of situational loopholes and such, but nevertheless, there is a cure. Now Avry has some people she cares for die in this instalment (I wont tell you who, but some do) and the cure doesn't work on anyone who died in this book. I don't know if I like or dislike this fact. I really liked the characters that died, and would have loved to see more of them, but at the same time I feel that it would have been a cop out to just conveniently discover the cure in time to save all her friends. This point was a hit and miss for me.

What I loved was we got to see Kerrick's point of view. I loved him from day one, and I was glad that we got to see the novel through his eyes every so often in the book. Not only that, but opening the reader to his point of view allowed the plot to thicken and develop in a way that I hadn't anticipated. This is a rarity for me. I can often anticipate the ending of a book within the first five chapters max.

Lastly, I want to just mention how well written the book was. Although, in the long run, I found that the lack of romantic development toward the love interests made the story less enjoyable, the book was well written and I really enjoyed it in an over all matter. 4 stars