Review: Indelible

INDELIBLE
The Twixt #1
Dawn Metcalf
Paranormal Young Adult
384 pages
HarlequinTEEN
Available July 30th
Source: eARC from publisher through NetGalley

THE STORY (from Goodreads)
Some things are permanent.

Indelible.

And they cannot be changed back.

Joy Malone learns this the night she sees a stranger with all-black eyes across a crowded room—right before the mystery boy tries to cut out her eye. Instead, the wound accidentally marks her as property of Indelible Ink, and this dangerous mistake thrusts Joy into an incomprehensible world—a world of monsters at the window, glowing girls on the doorstep, and a life that will never be the same.

Now, Joy must pretend to be Ink’s chosen one—his helper, his love, his something for the foreseeable future...and failure to be convincing means a painful death for them both. Swept into a world of monsters, illusion, immortal honor and revenge, Joy discovers that sometimes, there are no mistakes.

Somewhere between reality and myth lies…

THE TWIXT.

MY THOUGHTS
Indelible is a story packed with potential, a strange world of monsters and men yanking Joy into their midst with sharp claws and hissing threats, and we quickly find ourselves wrapped up in the cloak of darkness now sitting heavily on her young shoulders, waiting for both literal and figurative illumination to help us navigate through the unfamiliar. There are times when this story truly shines, small moments seeming to reflect and scatter light and thus chase away some of our shadowed confusion, but just as we try to make our way toward those moments to grab hold–moths to the flame of promised answers–we find ourselves returned the muddy grays of a world we don’t really understand.

Joy is someone who, much like the story itself, has brief moments where we see the type of character she could be–strong, loyal and extraordinarily accepting of the paranormal twist her life has taken–but before she reaches the line that would burn her into our memories, she always takes a step back, retreating into a sea of average young women who while likable, never become anything more for us. She can be hypocritical at times, criticizing her father, brother, and absent mother for keeping secrets when she does the exact same with them in the form of Ink, and while the nature of her secret is a bit different from those of her family’s, it’s completely lost on her that her own fear with regard to telling the truth might just be mirrored by her parents and older sibling.

Part of our frustration with Joy’s secret keeping in regard to Ink stems from the fact that we’re left very much on the outside of this world trying desperately to peer in, a bit clear as mud on Ink’s job as a Scribe and why his claiming of Joy has sent so many ripples through the world of the Folk. We’re given small tidbits as to what a Scribe does, but the correlation between Ink’s job and how it actually affects Joy and the human world is not drawn for us until the very end. In the final 20% of this story our questions are answered nearly in full, a near blinding light obliterating every shadow that’s dogged our every step as we’ve struggled through this tale with Joy, and a crashing sense of relief overtakes us as the many and varied threads of this story meet their match and tie themselves off.

With clarity finally granted to us in the concluding chapters, our overall reaction to Joy and Ink’s story shifts to something more positive than we’d been feeling up until that point, and we find ourselves looking forward to the next installment now that our understanding of the parameters of this world is more concrete. Joy and Ink both still have a ways to go before our hearts bear their mark, but there’s a great deal of promise in each of them, and the lack of angst in this first book has us hopeful their relationship will continue to be one of strength and growth moving forward.

Rating: 3.5/5
 

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This book was sent to me by the publisher free of charge for the purpose of a review. 

I received no other compensation and the above is my honest opinion.