A nice fantasy with a paranormal twist. Definitely worth checking out. Spoiler:- Goodreads synopsis: What if the world were going to end...and this were my one last chance to really do it right? Aria's life is kind of like a modern Cinderella. She feels like she's too normal to be the one person destined to fulfill an ancient prophecy that foretells the world's downfall at the hands of a fallen angel. But it's exactly that normalcy that has her in over her head when she ends up getting entangled in an ancient feud between fallen angels and their celestial counterparts. With fallen angels all around her, Aria isn't sure she'll ever be free of them and her fate as the heroine of a prophecy no one else believes in. Not when the prince of the fallen angels, Cadeon, is so hot. Hot enough to make her wish he was the one foretold to destroy all things. But to make a long story short, Aria and Cadeon just don't work well together, and to make it worse, his best friend is Aria's younger brother. And just when Cadeon starts pushing all her buttons, one of the angels reveals Aria's prophecy is wrong. She's not the key to salvation, and she never has been. It turns out that Aria isn't meant to save humanity after all. She's meant to save the angelic realm from destruction. And if Cadeon can't reconcile the angelic prophecy with the one his father taught him, it's up to him to unite humanity and save them all. Review: The book started out slow for me. I have really mixed feelings about the beginning of this book. The main protagonist, Aria, was annoying as she always felt like a whiny brat in some ways. She's so annoying that it got to the point where I wasn't really interested in her anymore and was waiting for her to get out of the way so I could get to the good parts. Aria is one of the most cliche characters I've ever read and she didn't help her situation. In regards to the plot, I felt like there was a lot of jumping around but the events were so scattered that at some point I could never keep track of what was going on. I don't really remember the book having a lot of big action scenes but maybe I missed them. The plot is centered around Aria who discovers that she's a key to something or other. But the book can be easily read as an introduction to some of the elements which play a key role in later books. For example, we get some of the background story on fallen angels and some of the stuff is not entirely revealed until later books, which leaves the possibility of coming back to it in the future. This is also a book with a lot of interesting characters that would fit nicely in the overall theme of the series, even if they are not main characters. All in all, I would recommend this to people who are at least interested in the overall plot of the series but wouldn't want to read any of the books if they haven't read the earlier books yet. It does leave a lot of things unresolved and can lead to many discussions about the "what if?"-like topics. Thursday, September 15, 2016 The story is set in a dystopian future. You have an elite group of people which is able to use a drug called Orion that basically acts like a psychic version of LSD. They keep it a secret that the drug isn't just legal in their country but actually created by government scientists. It basically lets users enter a trance-like state where they are able to basically control their bodies from the inside out. The book follows six friends who decide to go on a trip to another planet in order to use the drug and escape Earth forever. Unfortunately things don't go as planned. The story was very interesting, especially considering that the drug basically enables you to control your body and use it in whatever way you want. Of course, you'd have to have some training to learn how to control your body and that's not mentioned in the book at all. So I didn't know how that was even going to work out but I never considered that a problem because I had too many other problems to bother with it. And with a good writer, you can do pretty much anything you want with that premise. A lot of the problems in this book were basically caused by writer's fault. There was a whole lot of pointless details and the big things that were supposed to be "cool" or the main reason for doing something didn't even matter in the end. For example, there is a huge chunk of the book where we basically follow one of the main characters getting high on the drug and we are supposed to be wondering how many drugs you have to take to get that high and how long it can keep you in the state. Even when the main character actually got to do that experiment, we were shown no results of it and that's basically all we are given. The book never mentioned anything about how long the high lasted or how it compares to other drugs. It just leaves us wondering how cool and fascinating that is. The book did a pretty good job of describing the main characters. They actually managed to create quite an interesting mix of a group of people with different personalities. There was also some cool ideas in regards to who the main characters actually were, that way you never quite get tired of them. I don't really remember why I had a copy of this book in my personal stash but when I read the synopsis, I thought it would be a good book for me and I started reading it right away. At first I was expecting it to be about a group of teenagers going on an illegal drug trip but when it turned out to be some kind of science fiction thriller, I knew I had to read it. Unfortunately, there was just too much useless details in this book and it ended up boring me a lot. The book didn't really get going until around the end of the first act and even when it did start, it got back to all the random conversations again. Even the main characters didn't seem to have much personality, instead just having the same dialogue as in the previous scenes. The book also didn't have a lot of action. Even when it did, the way it was described made it feel like it was totally unnecessary. It didn't help that the author seemed to have a fixation on using sexist language. He even did that in some cases where it just wasn't needed. The characters were pretty interesting but it was also the main reason why the book was such a bore. I really had a hard time following what was going on and who the main characters were. I never even found out if the story was supposed to be about a group of teenagers on an illegal drug trip or whether it was some kind of science fiction thriller. And with all these problems, I ended up not enjoying the book at all. In spite of all these problems, I did like the character of the narrator. I was expecting someone a little older but I really liked how the author was able to introduce that guy without it being obvious who the narrator was. Summary: To be perfectly honest, I'm not even sure if I read everything the book was about. There was a whole lot of random thoughts and pointless conversations before the actual story starts and even after the actual story starts. And even the actual story did nothing to help me follow what was going on. Instead, we are shown an annoying group of teenagers who aren't really interesting. But that's why they're teenagers. Sunday, September 11, 2016 The book follows the story of a girl named Kira. She comes from a nice and normal family who lives in a town in a big mansion. And it is here where she first meets the person who will later become her husband, Jiro. The story basically follows Kira from when she is young, to her teenage years when she meets Jiro. I liked the book a lot for the first few chapters because I loved seeing Kira grow up and go through typical teenage problems, which isn't as common to see in YA novels these days. I just loved how the story was laid out with all these flashbacks. Unfortunately, the author decided to ruin the book by turning into a typical romance with the love triangle. The love triangle really doesn't fit into this kind of story, especially in the middle where there is still some focus on the relationship between Kira and her father. This book doesn't even get interesting until Kira becomes a teen and after that there are still problems in the way she treats the two love interests and it's often really hard to understand what she actually feels or what she is thinking. It really takes away a lot from the story and makes it hard to be able to appreciate it when you really want to get to the good parts. The book also had a lot of problems with some of the characters. Even after years, I still struggle to get my head around the main female character, Kira. In the beginning she seemed like a girl who had a lot of inner strength but as the book progressed, I was really having a hard time with her and what was happening in her mind. She seemed to be a very realistic character but the way she reacts to everything was a bit unrealistic. She got more and more unstable as the book went on and even then, nothing really happened. The book also made Jiro a lot less likable than he was originally described as. He was supposed