The Seer by Sonia Orin Lyris

A power hungry man comes to a young girl to ask for help with his immediate future.  When she ends up saving his life, he decides that he must own her, no matter the cost.

Let's start with the cover.  We have a girl with x-ray vision (cool!), a mean looking voodoo priestess who's about to bop her on the head, and a red mage in the background who's about to fling a serious ball of something at the priestess.  None of this has anything to do with the book.  It's cool art though, so rip the front cover off and frame it and hang it.  Forget it's affiliated with this book in any way.

This book is over 640 pages, so I've been putting it off.  I don't have an issue with longer books, but since I'm still catching up from over the summer, I wanted to get some of the thinner books finished first.  I was a little curious as to why the book was so long, but I figured that out pretty quickly.  It's a description issue.  Description is important in any book, but this one is pretty confusing.  A character that we love dies and we have one line for her death.  Then we get a two page description about a face lift to a castle room.  The book goes back and forth between characters, but where we could use a bit more description, I was left wanting.  A hundred pages of this book could easily have been hacked out.  It would have made it a much more enjoyable read.

There's one sex scene in the book, so if you're looking at picking this up for a minor, you might think twice.  I don't have issues with sex in books, as long as it's there for a reason...if it's integral to the story for some reason.  In this instance, it was clunky and didn't work.  It was a bad splice.  It felt like the author needed to find a bonding experience between two characters and took the easy way out.  The problem is that it doesn't fit with any facet of the book so you're left just feeling confused.

All of the bad stuff aside, I actually really enjoyed this book!  When I skimmed over the boring description, I found a fun story telling style.  The world makes sense and is built effortlessly.  The characters are flawlessly built and completely fascinating.  Even the background characters are vivid.  If it weren't for the minor issues I had (read previous paragraphs)  I would have thought this was a great read.  There's suspense, adventure, magic and fighting.