Review: Elora of Stone - Jaime Lee Mann

Elora of Stone by Jaime Lee Mann
Children's Adventure Fantasy

My Rating : {★★★☆☆}
Published December 2nd 2014 by Blue Moon Publishers
Source : Blue Moon Publishers via NetGalley

Four-year-old Asher Caine vanishes while playing near the woods one day with his twin sister Ariana. Eventually, his family believes him to be dead. In the Kingdom of Falmoor, twins are cursed. Ever since the evil sorcerer Larque turned the good witch Elora to stone, all twins in the Kingdom are doomed to be separated, either through death or mysterious disappearances.

Now about to turn thirteen, Ariana learns that her brother is alive, and she must find him in order to save Falmoor. With their magic blood and powerful bond, the Caine twins must release Elora from her stone imprisonment. Only then will Larque be stopped from spreading darkness throughout the kingdom.

Will the twins find each other in time? Can they save Falmoor from evil and remove the curse of the twins forever?

Actual rating 2.5 stars

For the most part this was not a bad book - it just wasn't anything to rave about. I was wanting something a little more complex - not in plot per se but rather in the writing style and diction: everything was a little too simplistic even for this book being aimed at middlegrade readers.

The plot in itself was not a bad one and in fact, told in the right way this story could have been extraordinary. Unfortunately it was flat - there was no intricate foreshadowing or ah-ha! moments and no sense of a great atmosphere being built even though we have everything required in the story itself.

It was a purely expository narrative and I think even younger readers enjoy using their imagination and gleaning little bits of information here and there as the author drops tid-bits along the way. But here, using both third person and first person narratives in the present tense we only seem to get given what little information we require to build the plot the author wishes us to know and what should have been a 'twist' at the end is actually far too expected and underwhelming. The final 15% of the book is a massive info dump explaining the entire plot and motives that have come before.

If you are wanting to read this book to your children I would recommend reading this yourself first and deciding if this story is for you. It's difficult to provide an age rating as each child is so individual and it really depends on what they can deal with emotionally. I think I would have enjoyed this as a young girl as it has a fairy-tale like quality with pixies, fairies and magic and adventure.

I would like to continue the series to see if the writing style improves and grows along with the story.

Into Coraira (Legend of Rhyme #2)→