Set in the lush jungles of the Amazon, author Victoria Griffith brings readers to the underbelly of Brazil where crime is the name of the name of the game.
Forget supermodels and the glitz and glamour of Sao Paulo fashion week. Welcome to Bona Vista, a small town near the Amazon. It home to the equivalent of the Brazilian mafia and firearms are open and carry.
Meet Emma Cohen, a young NYU student in an internship with a newspaper in Rio de Janeiro. Meet Jimmy Feldman, a medical doctor turned photographer. Together they enter the Amazon jungle and got more than what they bargained for.
THERE MIGHT BE SPOILERS IN THIS PORTION. STOP READING if you don’t want spoilers.
Amazon Burning
It’s full of action and steamy sex scenes; unfortunately the action was lagging at times and the bed scenes failed to be sexy. There are too many things going at the same time. Sometimes, I feel as if the book is trying to be the next Michael Crichton thriller while aspiring to be the next Fifty Shades of Grey. Alas, it failed in both.
And the one that really got to me; the mystery portion was a freebie in my eyes. The protagonists did not earn the solution. They stumbled on it!
I would have loved Emma and Jimmy to be developed tighter. As they were, Emma and Jimmy looked and acted like privileged kids amidst the poverty and human suffering they are witnessing.
Amazon Burning
When 22-year-old aspiring journalist, Emma Cohen, is forced to flee the comforts of her NYU student life, she maneuvers an internship from her father at his newspaper in Rio de Janeiro. There, Emma is immediately swept into a major news story–and a life-threatening situation–when a famous jungle environmentalist, Milton Silva, is mysteriously murdered.
Emma must now enter the Amazon rainforest with her father to investigate; both awed by the enormity and beauty of the Amazon, and appalled by its reckless destruction. Not only will Emma have to brave the primal world of the Amazon, she must fight to survive the kidnappers, villains, corrupt activists, and indigenous tribes that lay in wait along the ever-twisting trail of the murder case. Stretched to the brink, it’s up to Emma, her father and the dreamy news photographer, Jimmy, to unravel the mystery and live to tell the tale.
Amazon Burning by Victoria Griffith is a spectacular debut Young Adult novel. Griffith’s powerful rendering of the Amazon rainforest forms the perfect, wildly exotic backdrop for this extraordinary tale of a young urban woman coming of age in the midst of intense conflict.
