To be fully honest with you guys, this was so short, I didn’t even realize when it ended. It has so many complicated aspects and so many extraordinary beings, I didn’t even get to become familiar with them. I am not saying this as a negative comment, I just want more.

Sam is a Void – she steals other’s abilities. This doesn’t make her the popular kid in school, on the contrary. She deals with being isolated, she deals with family issues, teenage stuff, I feel her life is more full of trouble than good things. So from this point of view, she is as normal as possible – if you can consider someone with special abilities as normal.

The plot is intense and still has a lot to offer. I mean, this world is just expanding. As our main character gets more an more absorbed by the murder, she becomes more aware of her surroundings, abilities and matures enough – for the first book, I mean.

I loved the narration. We have a clean voice, a clear pronunciation and the perfect pacing. Janelle Tedesco gives life to Sam as no other. Her tone is perfect for the story and I did enjoy the voice acting.

All in all, I cannot wait to learn more about this world and see what lies next for our main characters. Will Sam have the opportunity to a romance like no other? There are still many relationships to explore and I am eager for more. 4 stars for now J ( )

Not great, not terrible. Not original and clichéed as fuck.
The weakest part was the romance which seems to also be the linchpin of the story.
It's classic lust at first sight with no good reason. She starts to feel inexplicably drawn to him and crave his touch and so on immediately while first meeting him even before they ever exchanged a single word really. There is bad insta-love and then there is this book.

The other problem I had is less with this book specifically but more with all the plethora of books that follow this same formula.
Magic races have been unveiled and forcefully deported into containment zones (call "reservations" in this case) basically like a prison city.
But it is never explained why the hell any of these incredibly powerful people should accept this completely inhumane treatment. It's not only the extreme segregation but also the casual and severe mistreatment of the inmates.
If it was just a single race with some very specific but very easily exploitable weak point or a sci-fi setting with much more advanced tech, sure, maybe.
But in modern times?
This stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of the basic social contract of countries.
The reason why modern governments work is that the citizens get rights and certain guarantees from the government body in exchange for giving up certain freedoms. You don't need to abide by the rules of a government if you don't get anything worthwhile in exchange and if they can't suppress you by force. This is why corrupt governments always lead to high crime rates. If you apply this very basic societal model to books with a world-building setup like this everything falls apart.
Only those who can't fight back or have exploitable weaknesses would end up in reservations like that. Most others would either end up in resistance groups (guerilla groups or outright war) or move to places where they can get a better social contract.
The idea of working camps is to extract as much value out of your prisoners as you can. And these people have literal magic. Why the hell would they have them wash cloth diapers by hand?
And if it's just outright bigotry with nobody in power prudent enough to exploit the potential then they would just be killed. Done. They clearly don't care and are not made to care by human citizens either. So why go through all the hassle of keeping them contained?
Regardless of how you look at this basic setup it just doesn't work.

But after this long semi-off-topic rant I want to make clear that this was not particularly good even ignoring the flawed world-building setup.
It's just tired tropes and clichées all the way down.
I could have partially forgiven this with the excuse that it's hard to cram an entire story into 100 pages without heavily utilizing tropes, but this is not a complete story. It's only the first third of one. I expect this is literally a 300-page book released in 3 100-page chunks. ( )

All supernatural individuals have been corralled into reservations in this paranormal novella. Sam, a local resident, has an unusual gifts - stealing power from others. Living a life in the straight and narrow isn't easy and becomes much more difficult when a vampire walks into her life.

This is one of those reads where you need to get the next book! I look forward to seeing how Sam's saga plays out! ( )

Not a book

This is more the first part of a book, establishing characters and motivations but lacking real substance.

Clean prose (no major spelling or grammar errors) and well written dialogue.

Depressing, since it only establishes the main character’s situation.

It’s not bad, it’s just not good.

I will not be following this series. I prefer my novels to contain a full story. Even a novella should have more story than this did. ( )

Not a book

This is more the first part of a book, establishing characters and motivations but lacking real substance.

Clean prose (no major spelling or grammar errors) and well written dialogue.

Depressing, since it only establishes the main character’s situation.

It’s not bad, it’s just not good.

I will not be following this series. I prefer my novels to contain a full story. Even a novella should have more story than this did. ( )