City in Embers by Stacey Marie Brown

*ARC received for an honest review, thank you!

Zoey Daniels has been tossed from foster home to foster home, where she grows up fast and tough. When she is placed in her "last-chance" home, she finds a reason to stay and turn her life around: her foster sister, Lexie, who is paralysed and confined to a wheelchair. Zoey will do anything to keep her safe. After high school, Zoey is hired by a special government agency, the Department of Molecular Genetics (DMG), where she meets the other reason to remain: Daniel, her co-worker. The man she loves. 

But there is something unique about Zoey. She can see fae. Because of this, the DMG hires her to work as a Collector: catching, researching, testing and using the fae to save human lives. The work never registers on her sympathy radar. She was raised to think of fae as beasts that feed on humans and want to destroy them.

When devastation hits Seattle, Zoey's whole world is turned upside down. The electric storm connects her to a ruthless fae, a Wanderer named Ryker, whose dealings expose them to even more trouble and danger. They embark on a journey, running and hiding from both the government and fae, both of which threaten their lives and those they love.

Ms Brown is very quickly becoming one of my favourite authors, having read her Darkness series just weeks before starting this one, I think I'm starting to become obsessed with her stories and definitely her characters. Whilst City in Embers takes place in the same world and time period as the Darkness series, the characters and the writing couldn't have been more different. I feel as though there was an added layer of maturity, which I feel came from Zoey and all of the hardships she was put through even before the electrical storm hits. Zoey's and Ryker's relationship was rocky at best, each hating the other's species as well as being the complete opposites of each other, but watching them grow throughout the book from blindly hating the other to accepting their differences, had to be one of my favourite aspects of the novel. Pair this with the non-stop action, secrets and betrayals the two have to traverse throughout the devastation of a flattened city, strap yourselves in for a wild ride fret with danger, magic and a narcoleptic talking monkey. 

Rating: 4.5/5 Titans