★★★★★
The first thing I want to say is: PLEASE READ THIS BOOK SO I HAVE SOMEONE TO TALK TO ABOUT IT.
It’s been a long time since I’ve stayed up until 3:00 a.m. to read a book, but last night, I was up until 3:00 finishing Roar.
You can tell Cora Carmack isn’t your average YA fantasy writer. She got her start writing contemporary adult romance books (Losing It, for example). However, breaking into the YA fantasy realm has been a dream of hers for the last decade, according to her post on Goodreads.
So, there’s the answer to my question of “Where have you been all my life?”
I’m not really a romance person, but Roar has me wondering if I should pick up Carmack’s other books.
You can tell that Cora writes romance, too, and not in a bad way. The steamier scenes are more realistic than most YA, but the characters also have more depth. It isn’t just ‘Aurora hated herself for being attracted to the dark, brooding man with the strong jawline.’ The characters get to know each other on a deeper level, though obviously there is physical attraction as well. There’s just another level there that you don’t often see in YA — a certain grounded reality, even in a fantasy.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s pretty obvious once you meet the main man that he and Aurora are going to fall for each other. But instead of rolling my eyes into the back of my head every time they had a ~moment~, I actually enjoyed reading about them.
Also, can we talk about a slow burn? Things don’t technically pick up until the end of the book, but I wanted to know what was happening the whole time. I generally measure whether I like a book by thinking to myself, “Am I curious as to what happens to this character?” And with Roar, the answer was always yes, even in the slower parts.
I try very hard to keep these reviews spoiler-free, so I won’t say much about Aurora’s character development, other than to say that it’s there and it’s great. There are also multiple POVs, and Carmack handles them very well in third person omniscient. I was never turned around or confused about whose perspective I was in, and there was never an ‘okay, can we get back to the other storyline??’ moment.
Also, this book was a wonderful set-up for a series. It sowed a lot of seeds for future books, and that’s awesome. Because I will be first in line when Book 2 is available.
