"A riveting world, a fierce heroine, and electrifying action--I burned through this sparkling debut!" —Sarah J. Maas, New York Times bestselling author
Edinburgh, 1844. Beautiful Aileana Kameron only looks the part of an aristocratic young lady. In fact, she's spent the year since her mother died developing her ability to sense the presence of sìthichean, a faery race bent on slaughtering humans. She has a secret mission: to destroy the faery who murdered her mother. But when she learns she's a Falconer, the last in a line of female warriors and the sole hope of preventing a powerful faery population from massacring all of humanity, her quest for revenge gets a whole lot more complicated. Now in paperback, this electrifying thriller—the first volume of a trilogy from an exciting new voice in young adult fantasy—blends romance and action with steampunk technology and Scottish lore in a deliciously addictive read.
"Crimson suits you best."
I stumbled across this book at the library here in Virginia, and when I read the synopsis of it, I knew that I had to try it out. Lo and behold, it would end up being one of my favorite books this year.
For one thing, the steampunk aspect of this book, paired with 17th Century Scotland was something that I didn't expect to work so well but it really did. Maybe the only thing that kind of messed me up was that I would keep forgetting that Aileana was Scottish until she'd say "Aye". It was as if I was in an entirely new world filled with the infamous Fae creatures that I've come to learn and love - well some of them anyway - in an entirely new light that was nice to hear about.
Let me start off by saying that I personally liked Aileana. Yes, she's actually a proper Lady, with money, status, and a title that not all women can say they have. If she were to get married, her husband would probably inherit a lot of wealth and prestige. However, ever since her mother was murdered right in front of her eyes, she had no desire to be a part of that world anymore. She had vengeance in her heart, almost to the point of hatred, and all she wanted to do was find the Fae that killed her mother and exact her revenge. In the meantime, she did what she could: taking care of the other dangerous Fae around Edinburgh so that the human casualty rate wasn't ridiculously high.
But how did she go from a lady that only cared about society's parties, to someone that would spend her days inventing new weapons and her nights slaying the Fae?
She had a mysterious teacher, one that wasn't all that human himself. She spent an entire year training with him, a Fae named Kiaran, one of the most powerful breeds of Fae in existence. But what she didn't know was that there was something far worse at stake, and all of her nights that she spent fighting alone behind Kiaran's back would make her a target, and the real fight would begin. She would have to put aside her revenge plans and figure out how a barely trained Falconer, a breed of warrior woman that have the power to kill the Fae, would be able to save the world on her own.
Aileana was an interesting protagonist. She had no problem letting us know that she was in pain, and having the memory of her mother killed right in front of her eyes was something that she couldn't let go of so easily. Anything that even resembled her mother would bring her back to that night, and it would fill her with such a rage that it was almost dangerous to be around her. She knew that, and she tried to suppress it as much as she could around Kiaran so that he wouldn't know her weakness. It was something that despite all of her efforts, she just could not let it go. She felt like it was her fault that her mother was murdered because she didn't do anything to stop it. It led her to go out the next night and immediately try to kill a different Fae, and while she almost died, it was a good thing that Kiaran found her. She was thoroughly untrained that first night she tried to fight, and even though she knew it, she still wanted to satisfy the lust for death in her heart. The more she would kill, the happier she felt, even if it was just in that moment when the light would leave her victim's eyes.
I also liked the fact that she is an inventor. She created her very own flying machine, even though it seems like many of the rich families have at least one of their own. She designed and created her own, with a bat as the inspiration for its wings. She created all of the weapons she would use against the Fae. It was something that she would do with her mother, and even though her mother was gone, she kept up this important hobby that would become useful to her in her future battles. All in all, I liked her personality and her ingenuity.
One of the things that confused me though was how sometimes the chapters would jump through time. One chapter would end with a certain event going on and the next chapter would start off hours or even half a day later. It made me feel like I was missing something, or that I needed to go back and make sure that I didn't skip a page or something like that. I understand that not all chapters have to take place back to back but it still left me confused. The ending as well was one that I didn't understand. It ended up abruptly that I had to go back and see what happened, and yet I still didn't quite get it. Something definitely happened, but hopefully the next book will be able to explain it better than this first one did.
Rated: 4/5 ★
Forgive us, Father, for we have sinned
Brooklyn Stevens sits in a pool of her own blood, tied up and gagged. No one outside of these dank basement walls knows she’s here. No one can hear her scream.
Sofia Flores knows she shouldn’t have gotten involved. When she befriended Riley, Grace, and Alexis on her first day at school, she admired them, with their perfect hair and their good-girl ways. They said they wanted to save Brooklyn. They wanted to help her. Sofia didn’t realize they believed Brooklyn was possessed.
Now, Riley and the girls are performing an exorcism on Brooklyn—but their idea of an exorcism is closer to torture than salvation. All Sofia wants is to get out of this house. But there is no way out. Sofia can’t go against the other girls . . . unless she wants to be next. . . .
In this chilling debut, Danielle Vega delivers blood-curdling suspense and terror on every page. By the shockingly twisted end, readers will be faced with the most haunting question of all: Is there evil in all of us?
"More than anything in the world right now, I want to be pure. My dream echoes through my head. I hear the roaring train race down the tracks, and Karen's distant voice. Why can't you tell the truth?"
This book messed me up on so many levels.
First of all, I wasn't expecting such graphic violence to take place in this book. Yes, the cover did warn me and say that it was for mature audiences only, but I thought it was because it dealt with exorcism and religion and all that. Oh, no. That's not what made it for mature audiences at all.
We are first introduced to the main character Sofia Flores, who happens to be an Army brat. This is just another duty station for her, and she has to once again go through the motions of making friends and losing them within six months. It's typical for her, and while she hates it, she doesn't have much of a choice. Apparently, her last school was hard on her since she had to deal with terrible bullies, which we don't know the extent of until we get further into the story, and she doesn't know if she will get the same experience here.
Well lucky for Sofia, she meets a few people that she gets along with, and gets indoctrinated into this group of girls that seem to be pretty popular but also really nice: Riley, Grace, and Alexis. She also meets another girl named Brooklyn who was really nice to Sofia as well, but according to Riley and her gang, she's seriously disturbed and needs to be saved. It gets to the point that somehow, these girls end up kidnapping Brooklyn, keep her hostage in an abandoned house and perform an exorcism on her. This was definitely not what Sofia signed up for when she became friends with these girls, but she has no way of escaping this unless she goes along with Riley.
Anyone who has watched any scary movie that has an exorcism involved knows that things get really creepy and scary as hell. It's bound to happen when one believes that they are dealing with a person who is supposedly possessed by a demon or the Devil himself. But the things that Riley does to Brooklyn is borderline torture, and honestly, Sofia doesn't know if this is just a personal revenge agenda or what. There are things that happen in that short span of one night that makes us question if Riley is clinically insane, or if there really is something seriously wrong with Brooklyn.
The sad thing is that we don't get that answer until the end of the book, and by that time we find out something even more shocking that we can't believe the book just ends like that.
I personally do not like to read horror books, because I don't like to be afraid for nights on end. I'm just a big scaredy cat like that. I got through this book though for two reasons: 1) because it was our next book for the Bookish Babes Book Club, and 2) because the premise just sounded so interesting that I wanted to know what it had in store for me. I'm also glad that this book is the first in a series because there is no way that Danielle Vega can write a book like that and end it so suddenly like that. When I was reading it and was maybe five pages to the ending, I was so worried. There was no way that it was going to have a happy ending, and I still had no idea what I was in store for. That's how the book felt for me. I was constantly on the edge of my seat, trying to figure out exactly where the direction of this book was going, what was going to happen. I had to stay up one night past 2am just to make sure that I finished this damn book if it was the last thing I did! It sounds silly, but that's exactly what I did to make sure I wasn't left wondering by the time I went to bed.
I do not recommend this book if you do not like gore. It may not be as much as a Rated R movie like Underworld or others like that, but it's enough that the imagery is one that is not pleasing to the eye. If you are also religious and don't like to read books that deal with possession or the Devil, I wouldn't read this either. Other than that, I recommend at least reading the first book like I did and see what you think of it. Who knows? You may learn something new about what it really means to be evil.
Rated 4/5 ★
Being human is her greatest strength.
Sixteen-year-old Frost understands why she’s spent her entire life in an abandoned apartment building. The ruined streets below are hunting grounds for rogue robots and Eaters.
She understands why she’s never met a human besides her father. She even understands why he forbids her to look for medicine for her dying pet. But the thing is, it’s not her real father giving the orders…
It’s his memories.
Before he died, Frost’s father uploaded his consciousness into their robot servant. But the technology malfunctioned, and now her father fades in and out. So when Frost learns that there might be medicine on the other side of the ravaged city, she embarks on a dangerous journey to save the one living creature she loves.
With only a robot as a companion, Frost must face terrors of all sorts, from outrunning the vicious Eaters…to talking to the first boy she’s ever set eyes on. But can a girl who’s only seen the world through books and dusty windows survive on her own? Or will her first journey from home be her last?
"I want to see things the way you do."
The big reveal towards the end of the book blew my mind. Honestly, I should have seen it coming with the way that things were going, and yet it still came as a shock to me. Let me just put that out there since it's the biggest thought in my mind right now.
Okay, back to the review.
So this is a story about a girl named Frost (yes, another book named after the main protagonist) who lives in a world that is pretty much destroyed. We first meet her in a pretty much empty apartment with her dying pet brute. A brute is almost like a vicious pink dog, only not a dog but something worse. The fact that she was able to even have one of these creatures as a pet was astonishing to even her robot companion and anyone else she met. Everything was pretty much status quo for her until her robot Bunt told her that her beloved pet Romes was dying. It was that knowledge that made her want to leave the apartment for good and make to the promised land of The Battery, where the destruction of the world would be left behind and the healing could begin.
So they left the apartment, and that's when everything changed.
Frost is a sixteen-year-old girl, and yet I felt like she had the hope of a child, one that despite all of the death and destruction around her still believed that there was something better out there. That hope was what made her leave her life of solitude behind in that dreary apartment, one that made her risk everything in order to save Romes. It was that hope that ended up touching the humans she ended up meeting, Barrow and his son Flynn, even though there didn't seem to be anything left to hope for. She almost felt weak in my eyes, needing everyone else to save her in moments that were life or death. What good was this main character for, and what was it that made the author want to tell her story?
This combination of robots and zombie-like creatures was an interesting take that I hadn't come across before. Then again, I haven't read as many books as I would like, and this is one of the first zombie type books that I have decided to read. It was interesting though, to see that the people still left in this world were either enslaved by a vicious dictator, "Eaters" that couldn't help but feast on flesh, or other. The "other" group, which I would include Frost, Barrow, and Flynn in, were those that weren't yet enslaved, but not free either. They were just surviving from what was out there, trying to make sure that they weren't either killed or tortured by the ones that served the "Good John Lord". What happened to the world that it was so utterly destroyed?
There are rarely any good things that happened to Frost in this book. Not everyone we meet in this book makes it to the ending, both good guys and bad. The ending is almost a cliffhanger, and the revelation that both Frost and the reader finds out is one that completely changes the game. Did it make the hours spent on this book worth it? I would say so. Were there parts of the book that made it difficult to get through? Unfortunately, yes. There is supposed to be a sequel coming out in the near future, and I'm curious to know what Frost is going to do since she is pretty much on her own now. Were her efforts to save Romes really worth it? Is he going to die anyway? I'm still waiting to find out.
I don't regret reading this book, but I do regret reading it before the sequel came out. It was almost nice to see someone that didn't give up hope, even though I don't know how I would have reacted in her shoes. There were times when it seemed like everything was about to end, but then I saw I still had more of the book read and figured that something good had to happen eventually. All in all, it was an interesting read and I would recommend it to anyone that wants to see what happens when robots and zombies decide to take over the world.
Rated: 4/5 ★
