The Blandest of Ashes

This review is for the audiobook version of The Beautiful Ashes, by Jeaniene Frost. It’s the first in a series by the same author as The Night Huntress series, which was a fun read. The new one, not so much. The heroine is kind of blah. She’s really young, really inexperienced, and kind of wishy washy sometimes, which I guess I was too when I was 20.

Following the disappearance of her younger sister and the sudden death of her parents, Ivy Jenkins goes searching for answers. She ends up in the town where her sister’s last text messages came from and encounters more than she bargained on. Since she was a child, Ivy has seen things people told her weren’t there, but after meeting Adrian, she knows they haven’t been hallucinations but pockets of the underworld masquerading as our own. Her sister has been taken by demons that want to use Ivy to find an ancient weapon they can use in their war with the angels.

This is another book where I’m having a hard time determining if it was the reading or the writing I disliked. The reader seemed almost too emotional, to the point where I wanted to yell at Ivy to just chill out for a second and think. I’m not positive it was just the reading, the breathless and strained voice, since it could also be the writer trying to keep tension higher than reasonable, rather than having breaks for relief.

It wasn’t bad, and if one of my local libraries had the second I would probably listen to it, but I don’t feel the need to seek it out. I also don’t understand the title at all, since the only ashes in the book are the remains of demonic minions.