starsaga

A well written book, very mysterious and interesting, book 2 to come.
For the majority of the book, I could not tell what I was reading although it was well-written. After I stopped worrying about these two characters and realized this was more of a family struggle type of book rather than a romance I enjoyed it quite a bit. What I did not understand was that in the beginning Lily and Donovan were already deeply in love and knew that about each other. I think the lead in to this story could have been a little smoother for the reader, however there was plenty of build up for the first two-thirds of the book where Lily and Donovan, I can't for the life of me call them heroine and hero, circle one another. Lily is quite mature in her expression of emotion however she is quite immature (as a teenager should be) in her behavior. For a while there, I even thought this was some kind of rebellious stage that these two were going through, but they saw themselves as victims of society which I was not totally on board with because nothing had really happened. Clearly if something had, it would have been in the lead in to this book which was missing. Later on though, I realized that there was suffering and even more cruelly it was one-sided and quite brutal, at least that's how I imagined it without being given details. Another perplexing thing about this book was the introduction of Christopher and the whole Brit-boy romance that Lily has. I worry for him, because I can see him being terribly hurt by the whole ordeal once it plays out. I can't see that Lily has an undying love for Donovan either because she keeps sleeping with other men and bounces around a bit in between men. As I said earlier, not a romance but maybe a book about a forbidden kind of love that may or may not be as prevalent in society as hinted in this book. I just don't know.
So why did I take off the two stars from my rating. One because, it was not made clear that this is an incomplete story in the blurb or in the book when I started it. I don't appreciate when authors do this. Two, because although this book was well-written, it bounced around a lot, really a lot, making for not such a smooth read. If I read it with the idea that in real-life this is possible, then what is jarring is the terribly mature voice of an immature character and I cannot get over that.