How can love mend a heart full of hate?
Small town girl, Molly Bennett, moves to Los Angeles where she becomes an outsider while attending Beverly Hills High School. It seems life cannot be any more dreadful. Then one day after school, something magical happens. On a secluded hike in the Hollywood Hills, Molly chases her disobedient mutt and only friend into a hidden cavern. She stumbles upon a strange glimmering gateway that transports her to Arkana, a planet that is the cradle of an advanced human race. There, teenagers navigate amazing flying vehicles, compete in perilous games for glory, and possess supernatural powers. While Molly tries to wrap her mind around this unbelievable discovery, she meets the alluring and mysterious Victor Sorren. He is a Sentinel Apprentice, whose hatred toward people from Earth is beyond understanding. Yet every time Victor unpredictably saves Molly's life, his heart draws closer to hers, no matter how much he tries to fight against it. It further complicates things that their growing friendship is strictly forbidden. Earth people are prohibited in Arkana, yet Molly continues to cross through the portal to Arkana to see Victor. Torn between their double lives, they go down a dangerous path, from where there is no return and multiple endings.
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I received this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.The book's idea and story seemed really interesting and intriguing at first. And I kinda liked the story, but not the writing style. Many times I thought that the characters didn't seem "real", but more like stereotypicals. Chris is typical popular guy flirting with everybody and bragging about girls he's been with. Camilla is also very typical popular girl. It's all about repution and the looks with her. She's pretty cold and mean, but she also secretly hopes that she could someday just relax and wear sweatpants. And the mc Molly... Lonely guitar playing songwriter new girl. Her father is really overprotective and controlling. Molly wants to have an adventure and she falls in love with "bad boys" she feels sorry for. She wants to "rescue" them and she believes she can change them and teach them how to love etc. Almost every character was like picked from the catalog; here's the popular boy, popular girl, lonely new girl, orphan bad boy, overprotective father, absent father.... You get what I mean.
The plot seemed really interesting at first, but the more I read, the more I was confused and uncertain what the actual plot really was. I didn't know what the whole point was and what was the idea and purpose behind the story. Molly finds another world, meets people these and falls in love with the boy who's actually mean to her. What then? Where is the mystery? Or some crime to solve or bad guy to beat or some was between worlds? Who is the villain? There doesn't seem to be any ulterior motive or anything. So I did think that the book was fairly entertaining, if you don't mind that the character are really shallow and stereotypical. But there didn't seem to be any purpose or destination in this story. Sometimes I even had to check that I didn't accidentaly skip over pages, things seemed to jump from scene to other sometimes so randomly. And even when english isn't my first language, even I noticed some funny sentences and stuff. I don't usually notice them, grammar isn't my specialty, but now they bothered even me.
And the more I read, the more I noticed thing that bothered me. I couldn't not to notice how shallow and "false" the character were. I got angrier and angier with every page I read and even considered if I should left this one unfinished. But there were only about 50 pages left, so I decided to finish it. But the ending made me even angrier, it was so unbelievably stupid. First everything is great almost syrupy, then everything goes to hell and then there's magically some "supernatural powers" that save the situation and everything is great again. And moment later everything is going wrong again. And like magic, everything is fine again. And all this in about 20 pages. WTF?
So the result in my opinion is that promising book got lousier and lousier with every page and the ending was just awful. I read the synopsis for next book and it seems interesting, but I'm thinking that I'm gonna pass. I was so disappointed in this book, that I doubt that the next one will be any better. Sorry. It was difficult to decide how many start to give this book, 'cos the beginning was better than the ending. I decided that 2 stars would be appropriate. This book has been compared to Twilight and I can almost see why. There are some similarities, but I actually loved Twilight. This was bad. Well, I was a lot younger when I read Twilight and maybe I've developed as a reader, but I'm still going to defend Twilight. It was great and this was not. Sorry.
