Fire & Flood by Victoria Scott is a Sci Fi story that mixes in odd animals and a crazy race. Scott pulls you into Tella’s story and drags the reader through a jungle and a desert while trying to figure out who Tella can really trust. Despite a start that didn’t pull me in immediately, I found myself turning the pages to see just what was going to happen next.

Tella is sixteen and due to her brother’s illness, she and her family have moved to Middle of Nowhere, Montana. Out of nowhere, she is given a device that tells her of a race called the Brimstone Bleed that if she can win, could give her a cure for her brother’s illness. With that as motivation, Tella decides to take the device and attempt to save her brother.

This is where things get interesting. Scott introduces not only this race but also something called a Pandora which appears to be an animal that has been created in a lab. All of the Pandoras have hybrid abilities that will help their contender survive the race if they know how to communicate and use them.

I have mixed feelings about Tella. I honestly didn’t really care for her as a main character at first but it was more because she only talked about how much she disliked her life in Montana and didn’t have her friends around. I found her voice to be a bit annoying until we got pulled into the race portion of the story. As she started to realize and figure things out, I started to like her more.

Guy is still a bit of a mystery to me. I liked him but he definitely has his secrets. It was interesting to see the change in him from day one to the time when they were together after getting through the desert. I will be curious to see how his and Tella’s relationship changes going into the next book of the series.

I don’t want to give anything away with this story so I won’t be giving a ton of detail away. I will say I thought Scott did a great job of creating these characters and the world they are racing through. With that, I still have a ton of questions that I hope will be addressed in the next book. As I mentioned, I thought this one had a slow start for me and that was mostly due to me not immediately loving the main character. She grew on me though and I look forward to book two in this series.

If you like a lot of action mixed in with some science fiction definitely check this one out.