I love magic books. Mostly because there is just so much you can do with them. Stones to Ashes is a promising start to the Alchemists Academy series. I found it to be a younger YA book than most I have read lately. The romance was very minimal (so far, at least) and it was very PG. This book was more focused on the adventure, or quest as they called it.

The book revolves around a tree. Yes, you read that right. The academy is IN a beyond enormous TREE. How is that for unique??! The description of the tree and how it worked was actually pretty cool. Because the tree is massive you have to navigate it through these portal things. They kind of reminded me of the Room of Requirement in Harry Potter. You just think really hard about the place you want to go or the person you want to see and you get sucked into the portal and spit out at your location. And speaking of Harry Potter, I bet you are wondering if this book is like that book at all. It has similarities in the fact that it is a school and there is magic, but the similarities are very general. I didn't find it to be too similar. I thought Kailin Gow did a good job making the story her own.

Alchemist Academy seems to be more about the darker side of magic and more about secrets. I swear, I still don't know who I can trust and who I can't for any of the teachers. And I love when a book can keep me guessing about characters.

I enjoyed reading the book from a male's perspective. I do want to get to know the characters better in the next book. They seemed to be a bit surface throughout this book. There is so much going on that it was kind of hard to get into the details about every single person and thing in the story. Stones to Ashes has really good "bones" so I am super excited to see what direction the next book (and the series) goes in. I would like to see a little more character development in book two. I was also a little confused about some things. Like, how long did Spencer and Alana go to the school before Writ showed up? and if they were not all new students, how did they end up in the same classes? Shouldn't writ have gone into beginning classes? But that was just a little nit picky point that didn't really interrupt the flow of the story for me- I just took notice of it. I do have to say, I love how Writ's power is developing. It seems beyond cool, and I know it is going to play a big role in future books.

Overall, I liked Stones to Ashes. Since this was a really ambitious world to set up in a book of this length, I think the second book will be a better indicator of which character I like and trust. I can't wait to see where this series goes. I think this would be a great series for young teen guys (and girls!) to get into.