Gain Magic To The Bone (Allie Beckstrom, #1) Translated By Devon Monk Represented In E-Text

I was a kid, and I fell sick, my mom used to give me this horrid porridge that was supposed to help me recover quicker.
It was flat, bland, tasteless and coated my mouth in a way that made every mouthful a chore, Reading Magic to the Bone kind of reminded me of being back in bed, sick, and forced to eat some awful mush.
This book is not exciting, it's not enchanting, it's not funny, it's just, plain. blah.

Allie Beckstrom is a Hound, In a world where the use of magic always extracts a price, it is her job to track down spellcasters who illegally Offload the cost of magic onto innocents.
When Allie is called in to Hound a fiveyear old whose Offloaded illness bears the unmistakable signature of her rich, estranged father, it is up to her and her mysterious partner Zayvion to uncover the truth behind a conspiracy that is widerspread than it seems.


There's a bunch of things that made me slog through this book despite a deep desire to cut my losses and move on.
Devon Monk is a competent writer, By this, I mean, her story makes sense, she doesn't have any glaring grammatical or typographical errors, and her worldbuilding is decent.
An alternate reality where magic is not some pretty, easy thing with no consequences, where even the most powerful person needs to pay a price to use their talent, where there are limits to how you can use magic, where technology and magic coexist, all of this adds up to the elements for a fascinating story.


So, of course, Monk would have to go ruin a perfectly good idea by making her heroine ohsospecial, ohsounique and ohsotortured.
By creating a man who is so unnecessarily mysterious, he loses all mystique, By losing track of her plot and making her characters run all over the place with no clear destination in mind.


This is a book that could have been so much better than it actually was, Why do so many UF authors insist on making their heroines supernatural superwho are too stupid to live It's like a secret motto saying "With great power comes great stupidity".


Think about this, Allie is hurt, she has been shot in the chest by an assassin, and healed herself with magic, She is so weak, she's still seeing, and standing upright is a major task, Her lover/partner tells her to stay put while he goes out and finds them a safe hiding place.
As soon as he's gone, she decides to get out, Not because she doesn't trust him, Not because she doesn't want to put him in danger, No, she's fucking off from there, even though just getting off the elevator almost puts her flat on her face, because she doesn't want to wait around for him to save her.
Yes, I'm sure sensible people the world over will applaud her feminist instincts and her great sense of timing.
Not to mention that she immediately takes off towards the most dangerous part of town, This woman's thinking makes no sense,

Like the time when she's being chased by some bounty hunter on the way to the police station.
She evades her pursuer, grabs a cab and, . . three guesses as to where she heads, If you're guessing the police station, where she was going in the first place, you would be WRONG! No, our gutsy heroine decides to head to the seamiest part of town in search of.
a telephone! To call the police! Jesus H, Christ.

It's like Devon Monk has set points in her plotline A,B,C,etc, And she doesn't really care how her heroine gets from A to B, as long as the end points are there.
There is no forethought to her plotline, no idea that she's considered causes, effects, complexities,

Although I thought the chemistry between Allie and Zayvion was fine, Zayvion himself was kinda annoying, with his overt and meaningless compulsion to be cryptic.
Even after he's declared his love for Allie, he doesn't tell her anything about himself, what he does, who is threatening the woman he claims to love, and other such unnecessary information.
I'm sure I'm supposed to be waiting with bated breath to discover his deep, dark secrets in the second book, but I couldn't care less.


The only thing I liked in the book was the portrayal of Cody and his Kitten, and Allie's cavalier treatment of him annoyed me.
Cody was the only character in the book who made me sit up, pay attention and feel some emotion that wasn't boredom.
So, of course, Cody's story ended awkwardly, with no closure, except a couple of lines about him in a conversation.
Ugh.

All in all, I'd say it was a book worth reading, If, you know, you were mysteriously shipwrecked on a desert island with no TV or internet and the only other book you were carrying with you was Hush, Hush.
In between grading papers, and after spending weeks reading Inkdeath, I needed something fastpaced and exciting to read.
Urban fantasy is good for that, but I have been feeling a little bit burnt out on vampires, werewolves, and feyso what's an eager fantasy reader to do Along comes Devon Monk's Magic to the Bone, which blends many of the tropes of urban fantasy kickass heroine with daddy issues, sexy man of mystery, gritty urban setting with an original and promising take on magic.
In Allie Beckstrom's world, magic was discovered thirty years ago and available for the general public to use, albeit at a cost.
Those who use magic are subject to either a physical or mental cost, such as memory loss, the flu, or a raging migrainenot surprisingly, there are some who have figured out how to avoid paying the price by shifting it off to an innocent bystander, which is where Hounds like Allie come in.
Allie can trace magic back to its user, but of course she uses magic to do so, and it frequently "doubledips" on her her, resulting in twice the payback that an ordinary user would experience.
The story begins when a five year old boy is struck by magic, and Allie traces the magical offload back to her own father, a prominent Portland businessman.
Soon enough Allie finds herself way over her head in wild magic, corporate politics, and family secrets, and involved with the mysterious Zayvion Jones, whose background he won't reveal but whose abilities seem to complement Allie's own.

This novel is entertainingAllie's voice is appealing, the worldbuilding is original, and the plot moves along at a lightningfight pacebut it's not without its faults.
I wouldn't fit it into the "paranormal romance" genre, but at the same time Zayvion and Allie seem to fall into bed a bit easily, given how little she knows and is able to trust him.
Even though the rules of magic use in this world were original and interesting, in other respects the book is like a lot of urban fantasy, and to some readers it might feel stale.
The ending comes quick, and lacks resolutionit frustrated me, but in a way to make me shout "I have to wait until May for the next one!", which is a good thing.
Overall, I found this a promising start to a new series, which revived my interest in the urban fantasy genre.
.Stars


Devon Monk has given us a world where magic exists, but it's not a pretty world.
There are steep prices for using magic of any sort, and as always, there are ways to circumvent the system.
Allie's gift allows her to track those that would wish to hide their magical doings, She prefers to go her own way, forgetting the blood she shares with the man who made harnessing magic possible her father.


When the story opens it's Allie's birthday, and she's determined to do something nice for herself, Unfortunately, her plans go awry and she ends up getting called out the Hound when a boy gets deathly sick.
When that hounding leads her to believe her father is responsible for this illegal Offload, Allie goes to confront him.
Seven years since she's seen him last, and all the old bitterness and disappointment comes back so easily especially when she finds out her father has hired a man, Zavyion Jones, to trail her.
She thought she had all the shocks that would come her way, but she was wrong, It was just beginning.

I really enjoyed that the world the Devon Monk created was gritty, The use of magic left a residue that you could smell and feel in the air, the earth, the water.
The characters can set Disbursements that allow the magic offload to be handled in a specific way, sometimes through proxies and sometimes through specific effects on themselves.
It's a well realized world, filled to the brim with possibilities, I think there's a lot of room for us to see more here,

I really enjoyed experiencing this book through Allie, She's a strong, stubborn, honorable person, She likes helping people, using her magic to protect and do good, and has her own set of code that she tries to live by.
I also really like that she can at turns be impulsive, rash even, and at others she can be extremely cautious.
She doesn't mind paying the price for using her magic, accepts it as the cost of living how she wants to.
I find this admirable, but I have a problem with it too, One of her major costs of doing magic is memory loss hours, days, weeks, months I'm not sure if I can trust her to be a reliable narrator, to actually move forward into any sort of life, and the one thing measure she's taken to make sure she doesn't forget forever is writing in a notebook.
But the notes she writes are inconsistent, vague, and not detailed enough, in my opinion, However, this is a minor complaint,

There are some alternating thirdperson pointofview scenes in this book too, but they felt unnecessary unless that character comes to be more important in the future.


Then there's Zavyion, Allie was very drawn to him from the beginning, even against her own better

judgement, He's an intriguing character. I feel like we didn't get to know enough about him as he spent a good portion of the book evading answering any questions.
But I do know that his actions spoke fairly loud and I want to know him more,

The pacing of the story felt a little slow to me, While I was curious the entire time I was reading, it took me aboutpages to really get interested in what was going to happen.
What I didn't like is that there seemed to be far too much talk, and little action, Allie does some magic and then spends the nextpages talking about what she learned, what it could mean, what she should do now.
I would have liked some more action, Though I can appreciate that a first book in a series is going to take some time setting everything up.


Overall, I enjoyed this intro to Allie Beckstrom's world, though I felt there were some areas that could have drawn me in even more.
If you're looking for a gritty world with depth, and a strong heroine, then I'd definitely recommend trying Devon Monk's Magic to the Bone.

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