Fallen By Lauren Kate

As I have just bought the final installment of the Fallen series I thought it would be a good idea to review all four of them as I re-read them.  So the first of four, here is Fallen!

I’ve had Fallen since it first came out. It has gone up and down in my top ten list for the past few years. It’s usually pretty high up but it is a complex story line. The first book takes place in the Sword and Cross reform school. It is Lucinda (Luce) Price’s first day.  After a mysterious fire and a dead boy with a mysterious cause of death, Luce is left looking guilty and put into a reform school.  All her life Luce has seen “shadows” and when ever they turn up, someone dies.

The school is so utterly depressing, it is basically a prison with cameras or “reds” everywhere as the students call them. With dead grounds and many convict student who have to walk around with tracking bracelets on their ankles.

Shortly after arriving at Sword and Cross Luce is pulled into a love triangle. So cliché but it does work. There’s Cam, the kind, thoughtful, though kind of scary guy and Daniel  who is distant and brisk with Luce but for some reason she can’t help but feel like she’s met him before. That would be because she has. Luce is basically killed off and reincarnated every seventeen years, this is punishment for a certain angel who fell from the sky because he fell in love creating some big ol’ rift in the sky.

Luce finds a few friends, the eccentric Arianne and Penn. Penn is the only person in the school who’s isn’t there because they need mental help or are a convict. Her father used to be groundskeeper (but you can guess easily by the state of the school that there is not groundskeeper when Luce arrives at Sword and Cross) the headmaster is now her legal guardian. She’s the voice of reason and sanity in the book, and her character is vital. She's an office aide so she's the best person to go to to sneak some files!

The book is written exceptionally well and is very gripping. It could do with some more couple action in my mind. The main couple basically has only a few moments and they’re not all that romantic, I hope that will be changed in the future books. There’s more romance with other pairings, and I feel that this should be different. It’s hard to believe that the love between Luce and Daniel is true amazing love when they hardly connect with each other. There’s one kiss scene and they’re meant to be in love after a load of arguments and one smooch?

But I think that focusing on Luce that this book is quite good, following her story and not her romances is interesting.  Her actual life without romance is good, the shadows and the other characters are positive aspects of the novel. Luce’s friend Arianne is one of my personal favorite characters, she is a bit of a nut job who has a tracker bracelet on her ankle. But lets just keep it as she’s far from human, like a lot of people in this novel!

Overall I really enjoyed Fallen and have re-read it three times. It’s a solid eight from me!

8/10

lissy x

The Body Finder by Kimberly Derting

For only four quid off Amazon, I instantly thought “bargain” so I decided to get The Body Finder along with a few other books, even though I didn’t know to much about the book bar the title and basic plotline, but I have been pleasantly surprised before by books and this was no different. The basic plot line had me before I even opened the first page, the title pretty much explained all. The Body Finder is the story of Violet, a girl born with the unnatural ability for sense and find dead bodies. Some of the times its just dead birds that her cats dragged in, but sometimes its not. When she was only eight Violet finds the body of a murdered girl, and now years later a serial killer is on the loose in her town and Violet keeps finding the bodies, and the killer knows that something up with Violet , so he sets his eyes on her. All this is going on between the sudden regular teen drama of Violets best friend turning hot and falling in love with him.

I am the type of person who likes a bit off creepiness and stalking paralleled with some romance. I know I’m a strange one, but both are shown really well in The Body Finder, Violets searching for a killer while getting stalked and followed by him while balancing out the drama of just being a normal teenager, well a normal teenager with a really weird and morbid ability.

The Body Finder isn’t particularly complex which can be seen as a negative by some but there is still the air of mystery and confusion in the novel. It is a relatively short book compared to some at roughly three hundred pages. I found this the perfect book for some light reading because the plot instantly gets you and you don’t have to wade through two hundred pages to get to the real nitty gritty of the book. Its just the right book to curl up with before bed or on a train. I actually read most of this book while waiting to watch a theatre show that was very late starting and was rubbish, in the end I preferred the book than the horrid amateur production of Hamlet that forever ruined a classic.

I particularly like the cover art, the bright blue on black is just so vibrant it kept drawing my attention when it was on my desk, just prompting me to read it faster. The sequel ( I will be buying that very soon) has a similar cover art but in pink, I gotta say in a fan of this! What's really bugging me is that the third book has a miss matched cover. It annoys me so much that I'm spending a bomb on buying all three books hardback from America! 

Overall The Body finder was definitely worth the read. It will be going into my collection of favourite books on my desk, alongside the other books I have re-read so many times. It’s a solid eight out of ten from me!  

... The Start.

Time for my first review :) I am doing this for fun! just to vent my thought on books!