Marked - Sarah Fine [Servants of Fate]

Marked - Sarah Fine [Servants of Fate]
Source: Kindle Unlimited
Originally Reviewed: January 5, 2015
Rating: ★★★★☆

My first introduction to Sarah Fine was with her Guards of the Shadowlands trilogy. I was hooked on the first book. Even if I hadn't read that first, Marked would have done it all on it's own.

The thing about Guards of the Shadowlands is that, even though it was decidedly dark, it was most definitely YA. Touched is a far, far cry from all of that and the comparison has completely caught me by surprise. It's not that often that you find an author equally skilled in writing for both adult and YA audiences.

And Marked is definitely for an adult audience. My god, is it ever. Sarah Fine's talent is absolutely undeniable. Her work with the Guards has cemented that in my mind. Any author who can completely wrap me up in a YA novel let alone hold my attention through an entire series deserves bragging rights. That trend has definitely continued with Marked.

Cacey is a Ferry. Her family name, of course, but there's a reason for that. Her family helps the spirits of those who have passed transition to heaven or hell, wherever they are fated to go. The Ferries work on conjuction with the Kere, another race of beings who marks those fated for death by the Fates themselves.

She works as a paramedic, and she gets partnered with Eli, recently moved to Boston with his sister. Eli manages to tap into her secret, and both of their worlds are completely spun on their axis. We're thrust into a world of rogue Kere, and possibly even a conspiracy among the Fates that could unravel the tapestry of time and life itself.

All characters are phenomenally put together. Cacy and Eli are both very believable. Eli's sister, though she doesn't get a lot of screen time, becomes a major player and is very well developed. My only issue is with Cacy's immediate family. Her brothers and sister aren't nearly as well done as Cacy, Eli and his sister were. They seem a lot rougher and disjointed.

We already know that I think Fine is a brilliant author, though. However, and this is probably a silly gripe, the scenes between Cacy and Eli completely overshadow everything else. The story, minus Eli and Cacy, could have stood up fabulously on its own. The sexual tension between them was so. Intense. That alone was enough to distract from the non-romantic storyline. Then the tension finally gets acted on, and...

My girly parts tingle just from the memory.

But it was like two fully developed, independent storylines crammed together in a single book, with only a token effort to fuse them into a cohesive story.

Meh, what can I say though? Sarah Fine has me firmly in the grip of flawless dialogue, enrapturing creativity, and emotionally engaging people with stories that leave me breathless. 

Some Fine Day - Kat Ross

Some Fine Day - Kat Ross
Source: Kindle
Originally Reviewed: January 3, 2015
Rating: ★★★☆☆

Some Notes:

On page 137 I read a line where she’s wondering “Is it possible to have a midlife crisis at the age of sixteen?”

WOAH. She’s only 16? I completely forgot. The way she talked and acted, I thought she was about to graduate from a post-secondary military academy.

On page 199, it gets even better – because she’s sixteen.

“If I wanted to kill you right now with my bare hands, I could do it in a dozen different ways. Some fast, some slow. Some real slow.”

Sixteen. Sixteen years old, and this is what her dystopian society has turned her into. Then they wonder why she’s trying to *spoiler so I’m not finishing that sentence.*

There may not be any specific enemy in this book, but I’ll be damned if Ross didn’t give me a thoroughly hateable enemy in Raven Rock. If you have an enemy, they need to be hateable.

Moving on…

The fact that Jansin, the heroine, is only sixteen largely escapes me for perhaps 2/3 of the book. She doesn’t act like she’s a teenager. She’s not the only one. Her eventual love-interest, Will, is only a year older than she is and yet I keep thinking he’s in his late 20’s. I have a really hard time noting this as YA, except if it wasn’t YA there would have been a lot more happening between Jansin and Will than there was.

So, what exactly happened? I’d say about a generation ago (when the parents in this society were little and the “grandparents” were parents) we have an event similar to what you’d find in The Day After Tomorrow (I’m a sucker for end of the world movies, what can I say?). Massive, massive storms, though they don’t just freeze and die out in one hemisphere like the movie. Nope. They just charge right across the continents, causing massive flooding, scouring trees and even grass from the earth, and ending society as we know it.

A fraction of the population escapes underground. Future generations are taught that it was perfectly planned and executed. Heroes were born, and society saved. Except they left out the part about how many people were left to die on the surface, which Jansin finds out in the worst possible way.

On a vacation to the surface, she gets kidnapped. By humans.

She learns a lot about what things were like before the “descent”. She learns a lot about surviving, and about living, and about what the “real world” is like. She begins to question whether or not she would want to return underground.

She begins to question whether or not she would have the choice, once the militia from Raven Rock found her.

It is so hard to go into what makes this book special without spoilers. I know I’ve bashed YA novels before about their kids being unrealistic in the way they react to danger and their lives getting tossed around, but Ross handled things splendidly. You don’t spend almost 10 of your most formative years in a military academy to learn to freak out when crap hits the fan. No, you learn to breathe, to analyze, to act based on your desired outcome and not what’s currently raining down on you.

Jansin struggles of course. She goes through a massive trauma and it’s only 2 months before everybody decides she’s had enough time to recover and expect her to move on. Ain’t that just like an adult? She may have been trained for combat and all sorts of other things, but she’s still 16 years old and suffering from post-traumatic stress. Jansin deals in the only way she knows how – the way the military taught her – which really sets things up for a potentially explosive ending. The whole time everybody things she’s fine and has recovered, she’s questioning everything she was ever taught.

On the ending…

This has probably been one of the best YA dystopian society/post apocalyptic books I’ve read, but the ending was a HUGE let-down! So much of a let-down that I would have given this book 5 stars if only the ending wasn’t so damned anti-climactic. I want to know what happens to Raven Rock, and who’s where, and what was found… there’s so much I was left wanting to know. If this was obviously a book that was part of a series or a collection, it wouldn’t be so bad – the answers must be coming somewhere, right? But it’s not, so where are the answers?

Divergent - Veronica Roth [Divergent]

Divergent - Veronica Roth [Divergent]
Source: Kindle
Originally Reviewed: January 27, 2014
Rating: ★★★☆☆

Look, just being honest, this one struck me as a very mediocre book. The synopsis was engaging, had me intrigued and I debated a long time before finally purchasing because I'm not typically a fan of YA fiction (which this strikes me as).

With that out of the way, I do have to applaud Roth on her imagination. It's something I'm seeing a lot these days - authors with a lot of imagination, a lot of great ideas, but lacking either the technical skill or the time to really do them justice. Roth, unfortunately, falls into this category for me.

The idea of factions is reminiscent of old-school India (and I only say that because I'm not as familiar with the cultural arrangements of modern India as I am with the historical). A few of the classes in the book escape me, but the correlations that stand out to me the most are Brahmin/Abnegation (responsible for the "morality" of the people), Kshatriya/Dauntless (the warriors), and the Untouchables/Factionless (the ones who live separate from society and have the really crappy jobs).

Implementing this kind of a system into a modern setting, very possibly in the US itself, is... sobering. The thought that a society would become so self-destructive that they would turn to a caste-like system in order to save themselves, where there is a LARGE gap between factions (socially speaking, at least) and families can be torn apart just by where interests lay... it's a bleak picture of the world in deed, and Roth does a great job of illustrating it.

With an engaging premise and a solid world to build on, I was genuinely hopeful I wouldn't be disappointed by the characters... but I was. (To be fair, this is where I am usually let down the most in a book). This is also usually why I stay away from YA reads, as due to both the age of the main characters and the age of the intended reader, things are not nearly as developed as I prefer.

For a YA read, this would more than likely be one of the more superior reads available these days. From a book fiend who has read everything from Jane Eyre at age 12 to Harry Potter at age 25, it just doesn't measure up.