Tagged: quinn
Under My Skin by Shawntelle Madison
(Cover picture courtesy of NetGalley.)
Everyone wants to either be a member of the Guild or work for them. Little does the populace know that the Guild hides sinister secrets…
For Tate Sullivan, life in her small, coastal town is far from glamorous. The affluent lives of the Guild members and their servants isn’t something she has ever wanted. But all sixteen year-olds must take a simple test, and Tate’s result thrusts her into the Guild’s world, one where they hide horrible plans for those they select. Tate must fight the relentless General Dagon for control of her mind, body, and soul to keep the one precious thing she has always taken for granted: herself.
Her only ally is the same handsome boy she is pitted against in General Dagon’s deadly game. Quinn desires nothing more than to end the life of General Dagon who has taken over Tate’s mind. While romance blooms between Tate and Quinn, General Dagon plots to eventually take over Tate’s body, and love might end before it even begins.
[Full disclosure: I requested and received a free ebook through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.]
Okay, so the blurb gives away the fact that Tate has to fight off General Dagon, who is trying to stay immortal by taking over the minds (and thus the bodies) of young people. But don’t let the blurb fool you: this book is so much more complex.
I absolutely loved the world-building in Under My Skin. It combines all of the good elements of YA (a very emotional/personal journey, mature but not overly dry themes) and leaves out all of the trendy terrible elements (a love triangle, a useless best friend, an inability to lie on the part of the main character). While the science of the mind-transfer is left out in the beginning for obvious reasons, I was very happy that as Tate kept fighting for her life, more of it was revealed. I like the idea of their whole dystopian world, that the mysterious Guild pays off families to unknowingly sell their children into slavery. The Guild is pretty exclusive and although some of the rich merchant families are aware of what’s happening, they want in on it too for the chance at immortality. It’s kind of a sick cycle when you think about it.
I love Tate almost as much as I hate her name. She’s not a very strong character in the beginning, however. She’s very self-conscious of the scar she has from the doctor fixing her cleft palate as a baby and that makes her have very low self-esteem. It’s one of the vulnerabilities General Dagon exploits as he fights to control her body and I love the whole self-esteem journey she goes through. And my favourite part is that it’s at an organic pace. She doesn’t just suddenly gain the willpower to fight him; she fights a little bit in the beginning and her determination grows as her self-esteem does. Whether or not it’s enough to actually beat the ruthless Dagon is another question, however.
The plot is actually quite fast-paced considering that this is largely a character-driven novel. There’s of course the conflict with a society that steals the bodies of teenagers but the conflict is largely between Dagon and Tate. Yes, there is some romance, but it’s not the forefront of the novel all of the time. I’ve read so many books with contrived romance lately, that I really couldn’t stand it if Shawntelle Madison did the same thing. Thank goodness she didn’t! Instead, the focus is actually the main character and her struggle for her life. As it should be.
Although the plot ends on a pretty big cliffhanger, I was still quite satisfied with where Shawntelle Madison chose to leave off. It fulfilled the main conflict of the story but also introduced the secondary conflict as the centerpiece for the next book in the Immortality Strain series. I can’t wait for the second book!
I give this book 5/5 stars.
Earthbound by Aprilynne Pike
(Cover picture courtesy of All The Stacks.)
Tavia Michaels is the sole survivor of the plane crash that killed her parents. When she starts to see strange visions of a boy she’s never spoken with in real life, she begins to suspect that there’s much about her past that she isn’t being told.
Tavia immediately searches for answers, desperate to determine why she feels so drawn to a boy she hardly knows. But when Tavia discovers that the aunt and uncle who took her in after her parents’ death may have actually been responsible for the plane crash that killed them–and that she may have been the true intended victim–she flees for the safety of Camden, Maine, where the boy she sees in her visions instructs her to go.
Now, Tavia is on the run with no one to trust. No one, that is, except for her best friend and longtime crush, Benson.
Tavia feels torn between the boy who mysteriously comes to her at night and the boy who has been by her side every step of the way. But what Tavia doesn’t know is that the world is literally falling apart and that to save it she will have to unite with the boy in her visions. Only problem? To do so would mean rejecting Benson’s love. And that’s the one thing Tavia Michaels swore she’d never do.
I wanted to like this book. I really, really did. It was a Christmas present from my best friend, who usually has pretty good taste in books. She thought it sounded interesting, I thought it sounded slightly interesting. Why not give it a try?
Except for the fact that it’s a waste of your money, totally and utterly. If you changed the character’s names around you probably wouldn’t notice until about halfway through that the book isn’t Twilight. It’s trite and cliché and the characters were just painful. I was stuck in the viewpoint of Tavia the whole time and began actively cheering for her doom sometime around page 50.
Tavia is what we in the book industry call Too Stupid To Live. She believes her male stalker is not only trustworthy and harmless, but attractive as well! She follows this stalker in an unfamiliar place, not telling anyone where she’s going and all this while she’s on the run from people who want to kill her. Then she puts on the necklace that the voice of her past self in her head tells her to, essentially knowing that it’s going to change her forever and possibly kill her. Too. Stupid. To. Live.
Could the love interests be any blander? Quinn is a stalker, as usual, but Tavia loves him because he’s such a nice stalker! He would never harm her. (Cue eye-rolling.) Benson is such a typical geeky best-friend-who’s-secretly-in-love type that it made me want to throw the book at the wall. I would have but I don’t condone book vandalism. There was no unique spin on him and even at the end when his character supposedly changes I saw it coming a mile away and if you have the misfortune to read Earthbound, you will too.
The plot, oh the plot. It was all over the place, as if Aprilynne Pike couldn’t decide what she wanted to write: a reincarnation love story, a contemporary thriller or an urban fantasy novel. When we finally get an explanation for the Earthbound people my eyes almost rolled out of my head. Triangles being their sign, really? You couldn’t think of anything more original than that. There wasn’t even a new twist on that! Also, Pike needs to do some research about ancient Egypt. She seems to have gotten the First Dynasty mixed up with the Fourth. Oh well, what’s a couple hundred years?
The only reason I finished this book is because I’m incredibly stubborn. It’s not worth your time or the few braincells that are required to read it. There are no redeeming qualities in Earthbound at all so I guarantee this is the first and last book I’ll read by this author.
I give this book 0/5 stars.