Title: Shattered Blue
Status: The Light #1
Author: Lauren Bird Horowitz
Genre: Young Adult, Romance, Paranormal
General Thoughts: Twilight with fairies.
Rating: 2/5 stars.
Shattered Blue is the story of Noah, a sixteen-year-old girl who befriends a new student in her boarding school, Callum. But things are not exactly what they seem, as a strange feeling sinks in whenever Callum is around. Soon enough, things start getting interesting and even dangerous, threatening the relationship between them.
Disclaimer, I have tried to do this review multiple times in the past, but haven't been able to complete or publish it because of multiple problems while at it. After getting over my anger, I am now trying again and (hopefully) succeeding.
Shattered Blue was weird. It tried to be so many things, or rather, it tried not to be so many things. I could see that the author wanted to avoid a lot of cliches and pet peeves of the Young Adult Paranormal genre. She was very aware of them and tried to avoid it at all cost. But in reality, she ended up creating many other problems and even creating the same problems she was trying to avoid in the first place.
Let me explain.
She most profoundly tried to avoid the instant-love kind of setting and show it isn't a real, healthy relationship. But while trying to avoid it, she created another even more annoying instant-love kind of setting, one where the girl falls for the very troubled boy, and even worse, the brother.
She also tried to do an interesting plot that was simple enough, but really, it was lacking and also not original at all. And she did something that incredibly annoyed me, that is, hiding things from the reader. Alright, like, normally that's good. But she literally loaded all of the secrets in one character alone, and that sole character revealed those secrets in the worst kind of way. Like, firstly, the secrets were incredibly obvious and unsurprising, and secondly, the attitude didn't really fit in with what was happening. It all felt kind of uncomfortable and weird. Specially that scene where he tells them about the little girl's real identity. It made me cringe.
The characters... I'm not sure. Noah was alright, I guess, but she, at the end, became more of the dumb characters that we all hate in paranormal. I did like her poems, but I never really understood them. I don't know, they felt kind of unnecessary as well.
Callum was meh. All those secrets kind of put me down on liking him. And I'm so done with the "I want you, can't have you" struggle. Really, we are all done with it. And I hated how he changed so much through the book just so we could add the love triangle (hate that as well) with Callum's brother (can't remember his name).
And talking about that brother, he was a most contradictory character. At first renegade and violent, then just romantic, then violent, then super whinny. Definitely didn't like his character. And again, hate what the author did to Callum's image in order to get the brother in the picture.
I really believe that this novel has too many secrets, bad done secrets, to be all that enjoyable. Some for shadowing and a little more coherence would have helped.
And, this is more a personal thing, I completely guessed the whole plot. All of it. The sister being not her sister, the white fae thing... am I getting good or are they lowering their skills?
And the final, most important thing that annoyed me throughout the whole book, is that this is literally Twilight. Everything about it screams Twilight at me. It feels like what the author wished had happened on Twilight. But with fae. Literally. Twilight. The world don't need no mo'.
I did give those 2 stars because it did entertain me through it all, and there was some kind of originality in it. The other sister, everything that had to do about her, I liked. Actually, a book that was solely about Noah trying to figure her life after her sister's dead, and her mom and dad, etc. That, I would have enjoyed way more.
Small disclaimer section.
Due to it being an ARC, I won't put the first lines.
I received this copy in exchange of an honest review, for so, none of my feelings were affected or biased by the author or publisher.
