OKAY! On to what I started this blog for in the first place......BOOKS! My favorite genre, as of late, has been Paranormal Romance. However, I really read so many different types of books from Young Adult to Sci-fi to Biography. I love the urban genre especially when it is mixed into things like fantasy and paranormal reads. Some of my favorites series include:
Harry Potter by J.K Rowling
The House of Night by P.C. and Kristin Cast
The Otherworld by Kelley Armstrong
Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr
The Black Dagger Brotherhood by J.R. Ward
Immortals After Dark by Kresley Cole
The Heroes of Olympus by Rick Riordian
Saga by Brian Vaughan
Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
Lords of the Underworld by Gena Showalter
Mythos Academy by Jennifer Estep
and I'll read anything that has the Xmen in it!
I'm going to review a lot of these series here so you can come back and see what I thought about them in depth later, but right now I'd like to talk about my first book for review
Unearthly by Cynthia Hand (WARNING: Here there be Spoilers, but I'll try not to give anything major away!)
Summary: In the beginning, there's a boy standing in the trees . . . .
Clara Gardner has recently learned that she's part angel. Having angel
blood run through her veins not only makes her smarter, stronger, and
faster than humans (a word, she realizes, that no longer applies to
her), but it means she has a purpose, something she was put on this earth to do. Figuring out what that is, though, isn't easy.
Her
visions of a raging forest fire and an alluring stranger lead her to a
new school in a new town. When she meets Christian, who turns out to be
the boy of her dreams (literally), everything seems to fall into place
and out of place at the same time. Because there's another guy, Tucker,
who appeals to Clara's less angelic side.
As Clara tries to find
her way in a world she no longer understands, she encounters unseen
dangers and choices she never thought she'd have to make between honesty
and deceit, love and duty, good and evil. When the fire from her vision
finally ignites, will Clara be ready to face her destiny?
Unearthly is a moving tale of love and fate, and the struggle between following the rules and following your heart.
Review: Unearthly is one of my first reads involving angels, and at first I was a little wary with the topic, but I was pleasantly surprised with it in the end. Clara Gardner is a teenager that got picked up and moved three states up from California to Montana to fulfill a divine mission all because of her ......bloodline. Her divine mission, called a Purpose, is given to Clara because she is 1/4 angel, also known as an Angel-Blood. Her mother is half angel and passed along the bloodline to both Clara and her little brother Jeffrey. Starting with dreams and getting more intense to include actual visions (some in the middle of the day, even in front of other people) Clara sees the events leading up to and during the moment in time that her Purpose will actually happen. After seeing a boy of her own age in forest in Montana with a raging fire behind him, her mother packs up the whole family and moves there so that she can complete her purpose exactly when Clara is suppose too. In doing so Clara finds herself in the middle of a love-triangle that has her split between what she WANTS to do and what she's SUPPOSE to do, and it has some very real consequences, but I didn't really get any answers as to what those consquences are....yet.
Without giving you away the entire story, I'll start by saying this: This Book is definitely a love triangle read. Normally I'm not thrilled with triangles, but this one is a little different than most. Clara knows who she loves, and the second guy in the equation isn't a matter of her loving him at this moment, but feeling like destiny is putting them together. I felt that was a 180 degree turn from most YA triangles. The girl doesn't love two boys (at least right now) but she feels she is suppose too. It's a refreshing take on the romance scene because it isn't a fleeting choice, this could be life or death, Clara just can't figure out if what she chooses now is going to do something horrible in the future, and she is torn over it. Here's where my frustration lies with this book, Clara's mother.
Margaret will not tell Clara ANYTHING about being an angel-blood, just that they each have a purpose and that they exist. She won't even tell Clara her own purpose, and I think she puts Clara in a lot of danger. Why you might ask? One reason, angelic war. Apparently there are White Wings and Dark Wings in the world and they are locked into a heated battle to keep good and evil at bay, and she told Clara NOTHING about it and continues to leave her in the dark about almost everything in the angel-blood world.
There are so many questions that are left to be answered about Clara, her family and the everything else about angels in general after reading this that it left wanting so much more.....and that's probably exactly what I'm suppose to feel because there are two more books in this series at least! Overall I would recommend this book to anyone, even if they weren't an angel or paranormal reader because it isn't a world that the reader can't picture themselves in, really it's the opposite. Clara's world you can see as your own, just with some things that are really remarkable.
