Review: Indigo Awakening

INDIGO AWAKENING
The Hunted #1
Jordan Dane
Paranormal Young Adult
HarlequinTEEN
Available now
Source: eBook from publisher for review

THE STORY (from Goodreads)
Because of what you are, the Believers will hunt you down.

Voices told Lucas Darby to run. Voices no one else can hear. He’s warned his sister not to look for him, but Rayne refuses to let her troubled brother vanish on the streets of LA. In her desperate search, she meets Gabriel Stewart, a runaway with mysterious powers and far too many secrets. Rayne can’t explain her crazy need to trust the strange yet compelling boy—to touch him—to protect him even though he scares her.

A fanatical church secretly hunts psychic kids—gifted “Indigo” teens feared to be the next evolution of mankind—for reasons only “the Believers” know. Now Rayne’s only hope is Gabe, who is haunted by an awakening power—a force darker than either of them imagine—that could doom them all.

MY THOUGHTS
With an intriguing premise, Indigo Awakening pulls us quickly into a world nearly identical to our own save for one key element, bypassing a slow build up and thrusting us directly into the action as young Lucas escapes the confines of a mental health facility. Though the plot is not an altogether unique one, the concept of evolutionary advancement in the form of supernatural abilities in young kids is certainly fascinating, our minds unable to help wondering if perhaps somewhere in the world, behind closed doors or hidden away so as to not be exposed, such people and gifts exist, biding their time before they change the world as we know it.

Though conceptually an engrossing tale, we find ourselves a touch less enthused with regard to the myriad of characters, the large cast constantly jostling one another for our attention as we bounce back and forth between seven or eight of them. We get a tiny piece of each of their stories before moving on to the next person, asking ourselves all the while if that last brief interlude was truly necessary to the overall plot. Reading Indigo Awakening is a bit like standing just a few inches from a large stained glass window–the characters an indistinct blur of color, light, and shadow that has us aching to take a few step backs so we can see how everything fits together to create a unified image. Instead we remain pressed up close, feeling like we have little pieces of each person, but no real context to help us figure out who they are individually or how they relate to the larger whole.

Our time spent with secondary and tertiary characters limits our time with protagonists Rayne and Gabriel, and as a result, our investment in their romance is equally limited, their time together lacking the desired tension because we simply aren’t granted access to the moments where the relationship can truly build and develop in complexity. Perhaps the most poignant relationship is not Rayne and Gabriel at all, but rather that of Raphael and a little boy named Benny, the brotherly bond between them the one connection that truly tugs at our heartstrings and ensures an emotional link to the story itself.

Overall, Indigo Awakening presents a setup that never fails to pique our curiosity, our interest in the various young people and their gifts in particular enough to keep us turning the pages, however, the repeated short jumps between one character’s story and the next keeps us from really settling in. We’re constantly on the move, and for those readers like me who love to spend time getting to know the characters on whose journeys I’m piggybacking, this is a bit of a trying tale.

Rating: 3/5
 

Find Jordan:

Website • Blog • Facebook • Twitter • Amazon • Goodreads

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.

Review: In the Arms of Stone Angels

IN THE ARMS OF STONE ANGELS
Jordan Dane
Paranormal Young Adult
320 pages
Harlequin
Available Now
Received via Net Galley for review

THE STORY
Two years ago Brenna Nash called 911 and informed them she found the boy she loves crouching over the dead body of a classmate gripping a knife and chanting to himself. She hasn't seen him since that day. Now, after a couple long years, Brenna and her mother are returning to the small town where she made that fateful call and sentenced her best friend and first love to an unfathomable fate.

Upon her return, Brenna learns that White Bird has been in a mental institution the entire time she's been away, locked in his own mind and unresponsive to any outside stimuli. Though she's spent most of her time thinking about how that call changed her own life, she's finally realizing the impact she had on the one person she feels truly understood her.

There are plenty of people in town who aren't happy to see Brenna and her Native American sympathies back however, and they seek to keep her from looking into White Bird's case any way they can. The more she digs though, the more she begins to think her accusation against her best friend was very, very wrong, and maybe the person responsible for her classmate's death isn't the most obvious choice after all.

MY THOUGHTS
In the Arms of Stone Angels is a story both saddening and disheartening initially, drawing our attention to a darker side of humanity where certain individuals take gross pleasure in the pain and suffering of others as a way of ensuring their own misery isn't without ample company. Because we know people like Brenna's peers are unlikely to express any type of guilt or remorse over their actions, it becomes agonizingly clear that they will only steadily increase the intensity of their assault on her, a realization that causes are fingers to itch with the need to skip ahead to the end to hopefully relieve some of our stress and give us the strength to endure whatever atrocities are likely to occur. Even if we did flip to the end and find the opposite to be true– things with Brenna only getting worse instead of better–at least we could take a small comfort in being able to prepare ourselves for what's to come. We therefore wrestle with ourselves the entire time we're reading, wanting a definitive emotion, either happiness and relief or anger and hurt, to latch on to as a lifesaver to keep us afloat in the tempest of hate found in this little town.

Brenna is a hard young woman, an attitude of indifference firmly in place as she shuns a world she feels shunned her first. She's shrouded herself in so many layers of simulated feelings it's almost impossible to get to the heart of her, and we falter repeatedly as we attempt to decipher her true emotions from those she merely projects as a diversion from the truth. Her relationship with her mother is strained to a truly spectacular degree, so full of holes she doesn't even know where to begin patching should she wish to, so she instead decides to do nothing and allows those holes to slowly widen. Luckily for us though, Brenna exhibits some truly impressive growth as the story progresses, expanding her Brenna-centric world to eventually include her mother and us as she fights for the life of a friend to whom a grave injustice has been done.

Though the story is powerful and compelling and Brenna is a strong young heroine, the events toward the end seem to get resolved rather easily for the strength of the hatred and discrimination infecting both the teenagers and adults in this tale. For hundreds of pages we are tied in mental and emotional knots of increasing complexity, but then just as our determination to see wrongs righted reaches its peak, the ties unwind and slip free of their own accord and we're given a neatly wrapped-up resolution. People who have been truly awful seem to change their attitudes with little argument or opposition, causing the sincerity of their repentance to remain suspect with us given the quick nature of their turnaround. Perhaps if we were given a little extra time in the town itself and with Brenna and White Bird as well instead of being cut off fairly immediately after the truth comes to light, the changes might not have been as questionable. Overall however, In the Arms of Stone Angels is a darkly entertaining read, angering and pleasing us equally as we see a slow attitude adjustment start with one young woman and then spread like wildfire.

Rating: 3.5/5