Reviewed by Donna

TITLE: The Butterfly Finale

AUTHOR: Viano Oniomoh

PUBLISHER: Self Published

LENGTH: 276 Pages

RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2016

BLURB:

Ember Quinn believes he is content with his life. He’s got Mac; his overweight cat, his job as a security guard at the train station, and the house he’d bought with his hard earned money, and he thinks he doesn’t need anything else. But then one day, part of the Aurora Circus comes to town and sexy, intimidating Pyro sweeps him off his feet with a literal breath of fire. And Ember is suddenly not so content with his life anymore.

REVIEW:

This book has been languishing in my “need to review” pile for a couple of months now. Which was rather unprofessional of me (sorry author), but I found myself with a bit of a problem. When I first read the blurb I thought this was going to be a contemporary book. Contemporary with a bit of magic thrown in maybe, but definitely set in a world I’d recognize. But it’s not. It’s fantasy more than anything else, a bloody brilliant fantasy to be sure, but fantasy and I happen to be long standing enemies.

I see other reviewers discuss things like fantastic world building and I envy them their ability to take that in, in fact I’m in awe of authors who can actually create these exciting other worlds. Unfortunately, my brain refuses to cooperate when it comes to absorbing any kind of fantastical imagery. So I struggled through parts of this story, and that’s totally on me, and not the author’s fault at all. Maybe I should have asked another reviewer to read this book for me, but – this story was just so damn magical that I didn’t want to give it up to someone else. While I may have had trouble imagining the different environments the book travelled through and the places the characters explored, the circus itself, I can’t even describe how absolutely magical (I’ll probably use that word a lot) it all was.

There was such excitement written into many of the scenes. I could almost picture the author bouncing around excitedly yelling – Magic! We need more magic! And kissing! We need lots more kissing! What’s that saying? Like a kid in a candy store? That’s how this book made me feel. Flying mermaids, magical children, invisible circus tents, lands of ice and kisses which start fires (literally). This was like an adult fairytale, with the requisite wickedness tossed in of course, and it just made me feel happy.

The relationship between Pyro and Ember was so sweet I wanted to eat them both up, but in some ways it was secondary to the circus’s story. Don’t expect any sex here, despite the way these two start fires when they’re together. The buzzwords for this story are magical and sweet, and while Pyro and Ember are often connected at the lips, there are no explicit scenes. In fact, I’m not entirely sure what Amazon has tagged this book but I think it could safely be labeled as young adult. The characters are both in their twenties but they come across as much younger.

I don’t think this book will be for everybody, but I think some people will absolutely fall in love with it. I honestly didn’t want it to end and if the author ever decided to write more books set in the same world I would be on board to read them, whether they were m/m, f/f or m/f. And that is probably the greatest compliment I could give.

RATING: 

BUY LINK:

Amazon