All fiction reading requires a certain amount of suspension of disbelief. As a genre, Fantasy requires the most, because we must believe in a whole new world, usually with magic. However, there are limits to what a given reader will accept. Fortunately for this book, Young Adult readers are pretty forgiving. Most of them are at a romantic stage of their lives where they don’t know enough about the world to know how unrealistic any given story line might be. So a story including Poseidon, Hades, witches, wizards, Special Ops soldiers, magic wands and wormholes probably won’t faze them.
“Edge of Death,” as the title hints, is about as unrealistic as they come. The main character is a cousin of Zeus and a granddaughter of a Titan from Greek mythology. As such, she has just about any magic power you could think up: invisibility, firegrams (magic texting) healing, a death ray. She is also a trained assassin, six feet tall and muscular to match. However, this doesn’t stop her from standing in for a fashion model when it suits the plot. Actually, the fashion gig doesn’t have that much to do with the plot, but it does give readers a chance to dream. Through the story, the main character gets to parade around in all sorts of uniforms, cool casual clothes, and sexy dresses.
Perhaps the most endearing element of the story is this twenty-something trained assassin diving into the modern social whirl with the naïve enthusiasm of a sixteen-year-old. After all, it’s the first time she has seen dance clubs, cell phones, and the rest.
Because this book will appeal to the readership for which it was designed, I would have rated it at four stars. Unfortunately the lack of editing, including point-of-view jumps and awkward sentence structure, prevents me.
Recommended for teenage girls who want to dream and don’t care about reality of any sort.
(3 / 5)