Mystic City

By: Theo Lawrence

Narrated by: Celeste Ciulla

Length: 11 hrs and 20 mins

Publisher's Summary

With Mystic City, Theo Lawrence launches a bold new epic that is winning rave reviews and passionate fans everywhere. In the magical realm of Mystic City, Aria Rose, daughter to one of the city's ruling families, is betrothed to Thomas Foster, the son of her parents' enemies. With the unwanted marriage drawing closer, Aria encounters a rebel mystic from the Depths - and begins to question everything she knows about her world.

©2012 the Inkhouse (P)2012 Recorded Books

I tried. Multiple times.

MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD

I'm super disappointed in this book because this story world had SO much potential but it was wasted.
When I first saw this book almost seven years ago I was immediately captivated by the title: Mystic City. I love cities and I love fantasy (needless to say I love urban fantasy) so what could go wrong?

The characters are very flat and I honestly couldn't care less about them and what happened to them. There is really no one to root for in the story. All the villains are just evil for the sake of being evil and they don't really seem to have much of a motive for being so evil.
We're never filled in as to why Aria's parents are such assholes and why the Fosters were remotely relevant to the story. Nor are we truly filled in on the nature of the Foster's and the Rose's rivalry and why it was important to the story.
The mystics were my biggest problem. The blurb compared this book to X-Men and even though I didn't really expect it to be just like X-Men, the mystics are nowhere near as interesting. The story should have been about DaVita. She was remotely the most interesting person in the story and SPOILER ALERT dies for boring-ass Aria.

What would have improved this book massively is if it were told from the perspective of the mystics and not the rich, spoiled, boring Aries.

PS: I listened to the audio book and read the print copy. The narrator of the audiobook sounds like she's about 30 years older than the actual character is supposed to be. It was really bothersome.

Mediocre

The story is ok, nothing remarkable or special, until the end, where the final fight is played out so clunkily that it makes no sense. The performance is subpar, with a range of emotions so small that all of the characters seem to be exactly the same when the writing implies otherwise.