Dylan Kennedy’s life sucks. His mother moves them around every time her relationship with some guy goes south. No one seems to remember Dylan and he has no friends. There is the dream of the beautiful girl that he has had for, well for a long time but that’s just a dream. His mother once again drags him from his life the summer before his senior year. She takes them to his Grandparents house, who didn’t even know he had been born, in the middle of nowhere Oregon. Then she leaves him. Can it get any worse? Actually, it can. Dylan soon learns the girl from his dreams is real and needs his help. An evil first is trying to grab power in her realm and Dylan may be the only one who can stop him. Dylan is drawn to this girl, Kera, with an incredible force that can only be described as love. He has to be with her. Will this passion he feels for Kera be his strength or is undoing? Who will die? Who will live? The sage has foreseen misery. It won’t end well.
My thoughts:
4 stars- a great read
Shea creates an interesting world where the magical realm is bound from the human world by a wall. Those that are pure bloods are called firsts, though they seem like what most books call Fae. Half-bloods are despised and human are expendable. The book starts out with a purely human world with only small hints that Dylan may be more than he understands. Rapidly the book explodes into a magical world where things are far from what they seem. Very quickly Dylan is not an average boy facing his senior year of high school.
The characters are where I may have had some problems. I liked Dylan. He was beat-up by his terrible life but was still trying to do better than what he was given. The problems I had with him were in how quickly he understood his powers. With no training and without anyone’s guidance, he was able to really come up with some impressive magic. I’ve never seen a character be so instinctual about their skills. Perhaps that was as the author intended and I don’t give Dylan enough credit but it gave me pause while reading the book.
Kera was very strong and level headed to begin with and then I saw this strange change in her. I’m not really sure what happened. It may have been the realization that her father intended her to marry the evil Navar. That would do it for me but again it gave me pause.
There was one other small thing that bugged me. The love between Dylan and Kera was so all consuming and so quick that I was growling about one of those love-at-first sight issues. They did know each other from shared dreams but it didn’t seem to be enough for me. I finally did feel alright about this near the end. I’ll just say that this group of magical creatures falls in love once and it’s hard and fast. It’s all good.
The plot was incredible. Action packed and everything that could go wrong did. With ten pages to go, I was sure there would be this huge cliffhanger frustrating me for a year until the next book comes out but, no, the book ended with quite a bit of resolution. Does this mean things fell flat, no I’d say things happened rapidly.
If you’re like me, you may need to be patient for everything to fall into place with this book. Most likely you’ll love it from page one and think I’m nuts. Oh well. If you like paranormal romance, this is great one to read.
Shea Berkley | Goodreads | Amazon | B&N
I have declared for the Net Galley July challenge and this book is part of that. Thanks to Net Galley for the early look at this book. Check out the challenge here.
I have declared for the Net Galley July challenge and this book is part of that. Thanks to Net Galley for the early look at this book. Check out the challenge here.
This is a very interesting take on the usual fae novel. Especially since it's written in the POV of a male. Not sure how I feel about the love at first sight aspect though. It would have to be pretty convincing!
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