Slightly Off the Mark: book review: Fire & Heist, by Sarah Beth Hurst

Being a teenage girl is difficult enough, without your mother vanishing, your boyfriend breaking up with you, and being a wyvern--a weredragon. As if werewolves aren't bad enough. Then there's the fact that to gain her social standing in the wyvern society, Sky Hawkins has to commit a heist.

Naturally, Sky tackles the same heist her mother tried: the one that led to the downfall of her family's fortunes, and her mother's disappearance.

https://www.amazon.com/Fire-Heist-Sarah-Beth-Durst-ebook/dp/B07BD22J8F

Sarah Beth Hurst has created a society in which the weredragons, outcasts from another world, live uneasily among the human population of Earth, and practice burglary to cement their place in society. Sky's mother apparently fled after committing the worst sin of her people: Getting caught.

Sky assembles her unique team against the wishes of her father and brothers, who are trying to keep their heads down while Sky stirs the same pot that caused their problems to begin with. It's typical youthful rebellion, and leads to an adventure that changes everything.

Sarah Beth Hurst's young adult novel gives us a rich story and fun characters, presented in a straightforward way, and that makes me want to read more of her stuff. Maybe I'm still a young adult at heart, but there's something to be said with presenting an adventure story without a lot of gore or doom and gloom. Just the same, there are secrets and dark forces at work in this universe.

You can tell Hurst put a lot of work into world building, and it pays off with the characters of two different worlds who, as in real life, do dumb stuff, keep secrets, and generally act like people. Um, weredragons. The story has some great twists, and if Sky's romantic problems are solved in a way that seems a little too pat ... well, no book is perfect.