![]() I challenge anyone not to fall a bit in love with Julian and not to be caught off guard by the amazingly emotional ending. At worst it will be a quick fun read, at best you could still be totally blown away. If you're older and it's new to you, you might well notice some of its faults rather more, but if you're remotely into this genre, I'd still give it a go. If you read it when you were younger, I'd also recommend revisiting. I'd recommend this to any teenage girl without a second's hesitation. It's enthralling, very sexy in parts and quite nerve-wracking in others. It isn't a literary masterpiece, but it is more intelligent and interesting than you might expect from a paranormal romance aimed at teenagers. If the two could have been a bit more balanced (like with Stefan and Damon in the same author's other series, the Vampire Diaries) it would probably have added that bit more narrative tension. ![]() For most of books one and three he barely appears and when he does, he has no real romantic scenes with Jenny. At best he's totally normal, at worst a bit of a "you can't wear that sexy dress" type control freak. Nominally, this story is meant to be a bit of a love triangle, but the author seems to have little to no interest in Tom. *A related problem is the human love interest, Tom, Jenny's long-term boyfriend. Julian being into the uber-chic, cultured Audrey or take no nonsense, super-physical scared of nothing Dee would almost seem to make more sense. Clearly you always have to suspend disbelief a bit with this kind of story, but she didn't even seem the most interesting one out of her circle of friends. She seemed like a nice enough all-American high school girl - not really enough to catch the attention of an all-powerful, devastatingly handsome supernatural being. *More seriously, there never seemed to be enough justification for why Julian was so utterly obsessed with Jenny. There also appear to be some paragraphs that are almost repeated word for word. In particular, there must be literally about a hundred references to how blue Julian's eyes are. *Some of the description, especially of how the characters look, is incredibly repetitive. This is a book for teens and as such there's no sex scenes, but seriously, there are scenes in which Julian is just talking to the heroine, Jenny, or at most kissing her, that are more romantic and almost more erotic than anything I've read in more adult books.Īs this is meant to be a review and not a eulogy, I should briefly mention some of the bad stuff, but I promise that these don't detract from the overall effect: He's one of those characters who are half villain/half love interest which pop up in lots of books of this kind, but my goodness, never have I seen it done so well. *Moving away from the supporting characters though and on to the star of the show - Julian. I could really visualise all of them and imagine how they'd react to any given situation. *At times, especially in the first book, the supporting characters seemed in danger of being a bit 2 dimensional - the glamorous one, the sporty one, the geeky one - but as the story goes on, they really develop and they become one of the most interesting supporting casts I can remember in a book like this. Similarly, there's some clever stuff referencing history and literature and even surrealist painters, all of which is neatly weaved into the plot *Speaking of mythology, there's lots of detail about runes and the Nine Worlds and German legends, which really adds depth without ever weighing the story down. ![]() ![]() Yes, it's your standard girl meets mythical being, but rather than the endless vampires/witches/angels etc it's focussed on Norse mythology, which I at least have never seen used before. There are however lots of factors that make it special: On the surface at least, it's not much different from any of the hundreds of "paranormal romance" titles that dominate the teen sections of bookshops. It's difficult to pin down quite what makes it so fantastic. I needn't have worried - I read the whole thing in a few days and despite my tastes nowadays being rather more literary, still enjoyed it more than almost any book I've ever read. ![]() When I saw this new edition which collects the whole trilogy together in one book I couldn't resist revisiting it, despite my reservations that it wouldn't be as good as I remembered. Like many reviewers on here, I'm now in my mid-twenties and first read and loved this series in my teens. ![]()
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