Fifteen-year-old Emma just moved to a new city with her mother and her little brother. Their apartment building is still under construction, so regular power outages are not uncommon. When the power goes out just as they are leaving for a weekend camping trip, they don’t think much of it. That is until their car won’t start and their cell phones die. Not to mention all of the cars that are no longer working, parked on the road outside their building.
Since they are already packed for their trip, Emma’s ex-marine mother decides they will take their gear and canoe to a small, uninhabited island. As the outage continues, people become desperate and suddenly things are far from safe as the threat of violence increases.
What would happen if suddenly the things that you use and count on everyday suddenly quit working? Would you know how to get food and water? How to build a fire?
Personally, I am not the biggest fan of post-apocalyptic fiction. They’re so realistic. This novel, however, I found to be a great read that helped highlight our dependence on modern technology and convenience. When the power mysteriously quits working, the citizens in Emma’s new city home don’t handle it well because very few of them have the knowledge that allows them to survive without it. The longer the power remains out, the more desperate everyone becomes, bringing out the strengths and the weaknesses of each individual, as well as, bringing out the worst in them.
The setting allowed me, as the reader, to envision this happening nearly anywhere. Usually being able to imagine this sort of scenario in my own backyard would be one of the reasons I would not have enjoyed this novel but for some reason that was not the case here.
Reading this novel made me extremely thankful to family and friends who taught me how to grow food, build fires and shelters, and purify water throughout the years.
This book is listed, on Goodreads, as the fourth book in The Power of Three series by Eric Walters. However, since the main character shifts for this installment, I was able to read it without any difficulty or confusion. The author himself has informed me that the fourth book can be read without reading the first three.
I was happily surprised by how much I enjoyed this novel and would give it four out of five stars.
I would recommend this novel to fans of post-apocalyptic fiction such as The Road.
I won my copy of this novel on LibraryThing.com for the sole purpose of providing an honest review.

​The Order of St. George has been hunting dragons for centuries, nearly to the point of extinction. They are dragon slayers, legends of old, with a mission to protect the human race from the mighty, fire-breathing beasts.
Dragons have prevailed, however, hiding among us, blending into our society in their human forms. Talon, a powerful dragon organization, has managed to slowly grow their numbers, becoming stronger and more cunning with each passing year. They have positioned themselves across the globe, ready to take over the world, with the humans none the wiser.
Ember Hill wants to experience her one summer of freedom before being assigned her official place in Talon. With her brother, Dante, they are the only sister and brother known to dragon kind and they have a mission; to spend the summer learning how to assimilate themselves into human society. When Ember encounters a rogue dragon, however, she will begin to question all that Talon has taught her, all the while being hunted by the Order of St. George.
Garret Xavier Sebastian is a soldier for the Order of St. George. He has been trained to seek out and destroy dragons. Since the older the dragon the harder to kill, Talon’s youngest recruits are the perfect targets, easier to kill with less experience. Garret cannot kill without absolute proof that his target is a dragon. When Garret and his partner are sent to flush out a new hatchling, all evidence points to Ember and her brother Dante. Ember is confident and brave and has a zeal for life that makes Garret question everything St. George has taught him about dragons.
This novel has been on my “want-to-read” list since it was released in 2014. With the dragon-slaying Order of St. George and the Talon organization, I had a somewhat medieval fantasy realm in my mind just waiting to be revealed. I was wrong.
This novel is not set in a fantastical medieval realm but rather in modern day California, where we first meet the young dragons, Ember and Dante. They go surfing and hang out at the local smoothie shop. They are in many ways, average American teenagers.
Ember’s character is developed in a way that, at certain instances, you can almost forget that she is actually a fire-breathing dragon.
It is not uncommon in young adult novels to find that the characters, despite their young ages, have their lives figured out. They also often appear older than they are. These reasons, along with others, can sometimes be a deterrent to readers. I found Ember to defy the norms. She is confused, she doesn’t know what she wants, she doesn’t know what to think and she comes across as a teenager. Dante is the exact opposite, but he is surprisingly a minor character in the grand scheme of the story.
At the beginning of this novel, Garret is the perfect soldier; he doesn’t need to know anything besides how to do his job. Until he is sent to discover whether or not Ember is a dragon in disguise. The more time he spends with Ember and her friends, the more he begins to come across as a teenager.
The plot line follows their experiences over the summer. Ultimately that means that the level of intense action is subdued, but not necessarily in a bad way. Instead we see both Ember and Garret trying to learn how to behave like teenagers and learn that there are aspects to life they love that they have never been able to experience before.
I would give this novel 4.5 stars out of five and would recommend it to readers who enjoy clean romance and dragon fantasy novels.
I received my copy of this novel from my husband for Valentine’s Day.