Book Review - Burn Mark

Burn Mark
Author: Laura PowellSeries: Burn Mark #1
Genres: Fantasy, Witches| Young Adult
Release Date: June 19th 2012
Publishers: Bloomsbury
No. Pages: 416
Source: Borrowed
Rating:
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In a modern world where witches are hunted down and burned at the stake, two lives intersect. Glory is from a family of witches, and is desperate to develop her 'Fae' powers and become a witch herself, though witch-activity carries a threat of being burned at the stake. Lucas is the son of the Chief Prosecutor for the Inquisition with a privileged life very different from the witches he is being trained to prosecute. And then one day, both Glory and Lucas develop the Fae. In one fell stroke, their lives are inextricably bound together.

So this is the first Laura Powell book I have had the pleasure of reading, even though she's been on my radar for a while now. I will say this before anything else. this book, and her style of writing might not be for everyone. I know a lot of people will have problems with this book, I had a few myself, but overall I found myself thinking it was a good book and it was pretty unique. I like liked it, though it took me a while to read but that wasn't the books fault.

This book as you can tell from the summary is set in East London. Witches are real, witches are known to be real and they are hunted if they aren't registered. They are used for the governments own good, treated like animals and burnt in bellfire's when they are of no more use. Not nice is it? But that's how things are. Some witches decided to go unregistered, these are the witches that are supposedly responsible for the witchcrime happening.  Being a with is not easy, but with the rising numbers of witchcrime, its becoming more and more dangerous to be one.

I think the most interesting thing about this book is it was set from two sides. You have Glory who was born into a long line of witches and is currently living with her family of partial unregistered witches, she is someone who has not only  be taught to be proud of who she is and where she comes from but can think of nothing better than following in her mothers footsteps  and then you have Lucas, Lucas has had a completely different upbringing as the son of the Chief Prosecutor for the Inquisition, the place the rounds up the witches and puts them to justice.  He has been taught his whole life that witches are unnatural and deadly, that they shouldn't be allowed the same rights as everyone else, so you can imagine how scared he was to find the Fae mark on him one day.

The characters were different and interesting but at times, very annoying. Glory is a chav and even if she wasn't a witch I found it hard to connect with her for that reason. I know its bad, but that's just me. Lucas was a better character, and the sub characters like Auntie Angel and Troy were better. I will say this though, every character had a lot of back story and they were well developed, even if I didn't like them. Though the amount of characters that we were introduced to sometimes made it hard to focus on who was who, what their story was and what was going on. But when it stuck to one person and their story in one chapter, it was interesting and well done. The world building was actually pretty decent at time to but I felt the book dragged a lot before anything worth while happened and that made reading it pretty hard.

Like I've already said, even though a few things got to me,  I did like this book, it could be because it was the first book I had read in ages about witches, or it could be that even though I've wanted to read it for ages, it's not a book that's been hyped up so my expectations weren't high or low. Either way, I thought it was good.