Salt and Iron Blog Tour + Review

I read this book in between working through some long books as a relaxing break, and I ended up almost finishing the entire novella in one night. Instantly I fell in love with the characters, setting, and story, and the only thing I was wishing at the end of the novel was that it had been longer.

Magic is common in Billie’s world, and her place in this world is as a hunter. Other people have the power to summon, while even others have psychic powers. There are all kinds of monsters in this world, and Billie hones her powers to those that have gone rogue to try to harm others. When she is finally able to go on a mission by herself, she is excited, until she finds out that she has to work with a local psychic named Galileo. They did not get along at all in high school, and so she definitely doesn’t want to work with him. But in order to be put on more solo cases, she has to make sure this one goes well, so she will do everything she can to make things go smoothly. But when magic is involved, nothing usually goes smoothly. 

I love fantasy novellas, and this one shows exactly what I love about these types of books. It may be short, but there was so much story packed into these pages. This world is very unique as it merges a few different types of fantasy worlds, from fantasy worlds that include demons and summoning to fantasy worlds with hunters and psychics. I’m not even sure of how many different types of monsters exist in this world, as this book was mostly focused on the one case that Billie and Galileo were trying to solve. I plan to try to keep up with this series, so I hope that there is more discussion of the other monsters in the town later on. The action scenes where Billie was fighting/hunting down the different monsters/demons were also very fun to read. 

The only thing that brought this book down from 5 stars was the ending. I did like the ending, but I felt that by the end of the book I had been introduced to so many characters that I was forgetting who was who. I took about a day in between reading the first 80% of the book and reading the last 20% because I got busy. By the time I was reading the last 20%, I found myself looking in my highlights to figure out why some side characters were important/what they had done earlier in the story. I feel like if the characters had a bit more “screen-time” then I would have not had this problem with just a day break. 

I would definitely recommend this book to anyone looking for a short YA fantasy novel. 

I received a copy of this book and this is my voluntary review. 

Overall Rating: 4 out of 5 books