Search - The Fire Rose (Elemental Masters, Bk 1)

Good one...One of my favorites...mixed with elemental magic, a little history, and the bit of mysterious romance we love about the story, it's an easy read, and great take on the retelling of Beauty and the Beast...
Still on my shelf and will not be swapping!

^_^

I don't normally read this genre and have never read anything by Mercedes Lackey, but once I started reading this book I find it a pleasure and completely enjoyable.

ANNOTATION
One of the hottest writers in the fantasy genre, Mercedes Lackey boasts an audience that is impressively large and rapidly growing. This unusual new fantasy tells the story of a brave young woman caught in a clash between enemy sorcerers in San Francisco in the 1900s--on the eve of the San Francisco earthquake!

Very well-written story, the characters were fully fleshed-out and the details of the various locales put you right in the story. Interesting play on the Beauty and the Beast tale, but wonderfully-placed in the early 20th century, mostly in the San Francisco area, and culminating with a very famous local event. The love story was well-drawn out and the magical portions of the tale were a nice change from the urban-fantasy machinations of werewolves and vampires, though the main character was a werewolf of sorts. Altogether a great read, I was taking the book everywhere I went, and hated to have to put it down for any reason.

This is a good, easy read version of Beauty and the Beast, with an ending I like better than any of the other versions I've read. Unlike Robin McKinley's Beauty, however, this is a little more adult, with many references to opium, the white slave trade, Chinese prostitutes, breaking in new girls, etc. No graphic descriptions, but one of the side characters is really into it & it comes up often. There are also many, many references to classical literature we're either supposed to understand or shrug off. It's distracting, but you don't need to understand them to keep up with the story.

Although this is book one in the series, it is not connected to the other books and can be read in any order.

The page for the hardcover version has a fuller discription of the plot. I don't know why this page only has those couple sentences that really don't have much to do with the book at all.

Fresh take on the Beauty and the Beast story.