A review by theowlerybooks
Salt & Stone by Victoria Scott

4.0

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Synopsis:
Tella is a normal Teenage girl but her brother is extremely sick with a mysterious illness!! One day she get a box sent to her room and in the box is an ear piece and there is a recorded message on the ear piece saying she is invited to participate in the Brimstone Bleed! The winner of the Brimstone Bleed will win the cure for any disease! So of course Tella want to compete in this race to save her brothers life! There are 4 legs of the race: Jungle, Desert, Ocean, and Mountain.

What I liked:
I didn't like Tella, I LOVED her!! She was hilarious and had such personality! I have to give props to Victoria Scott for being able to make Tella personality shine through words it can be hard to do sometimes!

In the race competitors are given an egg and sometime during the first leg of the race the egg hatches! Inside the egg is an animal called "pandora" each pandora has a special power of some sort for example a fire breathing lion or a teleporting rat! Some pandoras have more than one power and they are usually designed to help the competitors survive the race! I cannot tell you what is in Tella's egg because of spoilers but it is pretty cool!! Anyone who like pokemon will get some nostalgic feels from pandoras! I loved that Tella was one of the few competitors that treated her pandora as a living thing and not just a tool to help her win!

There is a hint of a love story in this book (it's YA guys what were you expecting) BUT it is not that mushy gushy insta love romance so that was relief!! Throughout the race Tella is of course constantly thinking of her brother and that really hit home because I have two brothers myself who I would do anything for and Tella overall as a character is just incredible relatable!

What I Didn't Like:
While Tella's personality is just amazing sometimes she struck me as a bit self centered with some of the things she said and too focused on her looks and but then she did things like cutting of her hair (because a fellow competitor pulled on it) in order to give herself an advantage in the race which obviously means she doesn't care about her looks as long as she wins and that was pretty contradictory and it just didn't make sense. Those couple details I do not think were thought out well by the author but overall it did not affect the book all that much and it was still an awesome read!