Title: Fire Power
Author: Mir Benitz
Genre: Fantasy, YA
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
The Silverscale Grand Prix is the national championship of dragon racing—a high-speed, often deadly, elite sport with an unimaginably big cash prize.
Asta and her dragon Carmine are unlikely competitors. No sponsors, no high-tech gear, no fans out in the stands. Not to mention that a female rider hasn’t won the Prix for nearly sixty years. The odds are stacked against them—but Asta is determined to prove everyone the training school that kicked her out for fighting a classmate, her family who wished she’d never left the farm, and, most of all, her infuriatingly arrogant childhood-best-friend-turned-rival Felix, the poster-boy heir to the Seraphin racing dynasty and reigning tournament champion.
Raw talent alone won’t be enough to get Asta and Carmine through these races—and it soon becomes clear that the risks Asta has taken to get to Silverscale could have devastating consequences. Time to think fast, or die trying.
This didn’t work too well for me. I couldn’t really picture dragon racing as a whole, so it was hard to buy into everything else, too, but…I don’t know anything about Formula 1 racing, so maybe that was the problem. I liked Asta, but her repeated bad decisions were a lot to take in and the chemistry between her and Felix was…lacking.
Mir Benitz lives in Pennsylvania. Fire Power is her new novel.
(Galley courtesy of Little, Brown and Company in exchange for an honest review.)
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