Secrets of Ravenstone by Yza Dora is an interesting young adult dystopia set in the very near future of a world just next door to us. The protagonist, Yzavela is fleeing the city of London, after a sinister takeover, but it is a London (and a world) in which magick and the preternatural are par for the course.

Yzavela and her mom flee to Ravenstone, and we are introduced to a place where magick users, vampires, and werewolves, called Lycan, live in uneasy truce with one another. The descriptions are well-wrought, and I found it easy to picture the scenes.

I admit, and this is pure subjective preference, that I find myself growing wearied by the overabundance of stories using vampires and werewolves, so my enjoyment was less than it might have been. There are depths to mythology and cryptozoology that have yet to be plumbed in the sci-fi/fantasy world!

Technical aspects- while I enjoyed the story overall, there were places where the writing came across as stilted, and where extraneous detail would be better removed. Abrupt changes to POV were a bit confusing, and at times I had a spot of difficulty parsing things out.

Fans of Cassandra Clare’s Mortal Instruments series, and Richelle Mead’s Vampire Academy series would do well to check out Secrets of Ravenstone!