Review: Pretty good and interesting angel book.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 04 1, 2012
behaviors. She's taken to the town of Samos to live with the Gregors. The Gregors seem like a nice family, albeit kind of weird. Everything seems to go pretty well until Kyra notices strange things happening in the town.This story had me hooked from the start. Kyra was an interesting character. She definitely had a lot of anger inside of her. To me, that felt real for a foster kid in the system. She's quick to judge the people around her and was afraid to love. When she was sent to Samos, the town felt kind of creepy and mysterious. One can immediately tell from her foster family's behavior that things weren't completely right. I had a horror movie feeling as I read the book at first. All the mystery made me keep reading the book.There were a lot of twists in the plots that kept me at the edge of my seats. I'm not an expertise on angels and religion and God, so I don't know if the angelic story told here follows any religious teachings. Overall, I thought the paranormal element was very well done. I really enjoyed the backstory and world-building in this one.However, the book wasn't without its flaws. While Kyra's anger seemed real at first, it was a bit too much angst for me. Everything keeps coming back to how she couldn't trust anyone. It felt overly dramatic. I understand that she's had a hard life, but these parts felt too smoothed over and were barely mentioned. It needed a bit more fleshing out for me to completely agree with Kyra in that she's had a hard life. I've read plenty of books where heroines had worse things happen to them and wasn't that bitter, so occasionally she came off as a bit whiny. The book also came off preachy, because whenever a topic comes up, such as love or hope, there's some "belief" Kyra has about it, written in an omnipotent narrator POV than just a teenage girl's.The romance felt forced. It was insta-love, but the love felt like an afterthought more than anything. Kyra and Ashur didn't really interact with one another and suddenly Kyra's thinking about love. It was unrealistic to me and I wished the authors would have left that part out. As the romance wasn't the main part of the story, it wouldn't really have detracted from the story.Lastly, while I thought the world-building was very interesting, everything was a bit confusing. Everything came to light near the end, but I wish the explanations were more spaced out so I wasn't confused about what was going on half of the time, but since everything ties up in the end, this didn't bother me too much.Ning @ Reading by Kindle Fire