Review: *Contains a love triangle*
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 07 5, 2014
This is the story of an abused, and controlled girl, living in a cult, who finally gets the courage and hope to leave when she is kissed by a stranger. There's paranormal stuff, mystery and equal parts violence and kissing! I give it 4 stars for making such completely odd concepts feel so real and make sense. It was up there with *sparkling vampires in sunlight* half the time, and I was still like, "I can totally picture that." That has to count for a decent amount of writing talent.However, even though I was completely enthralled in the tale, I didn't like this book. There were 2 reasons.1. Love triangles: I absolutely, completely, utterly hate them. If I had any inkling from the synopsis that this book contained a love triangle, I wouldn't have bought it. I specifically hate love triangles between best friends or brothers.  It usually lowers my opinion of the heroine in general, which automatically makes me enjoy the book less. It is hard for me to root for someone, when the entire time I'm thinking, "I'll start caring about what happens to you, when you start caring how your indecisive personality is hurting everyone else". This wasn't completely how this love triangle went, but her careless "I don't care that you're brothers I want to kiss you anyway/ I'm going to lie to you cause I don't want you to know I've been kissing your brother" attitude annoyed me. It should have been hinted about in the description. After reading it, I still would have preferred to skip it.2: small town to big city: I didn't like how she transitioned between her old cult life to her big city one. At first I was enjoying reading about the conflicts of adjusting. I figured it was going to get emotional and touching pretty soon, maybe therapy...idk but once the paranormal stuff popped up again, it was like the author suddenly stopped caring about it. Her aunt all of a sudden loved her to death, the pool side didn't bother her anymore, she broke crazy rules, etc blah. I felt the whole plot point of her living post cult life was thrown away to make space for the mystery, and yes I do understand that maybe there was too much going on in this story, and some things had to be shortened or cut. Because of this point , however, I personally agree with another commenter who said the story would have been more enjoyable if it was just about the cult without the paranormal.I loved the roses though. I started looking then up as I read, trying to see what Naomi saw, and I want a green rose Bush now! It was added perfectly, and written beautifully, and suddenly something that should have been weird in this story, made it unique and memorable. Which, is another reason why, despite disliking most of the story, I enjoyed reading it and thought it deserved at least 4 stars.I'm also in the great great minority of team Kai...