18 Thoughts, by Jamie Ayres
Genre: Young-adult, coming-of-age, paranormal-romance
Publisher: Curiosity Quills Press
Date of Publication: 01/27/15
Cover Artist: Michelle Johnson at Blue Sky Design
Synopsis
Olga Gay Worontzoff left the Underworld for her final year of high school anxious for things to return to normal, but fate has other plans.
The new hottie at school reads her thoughts but nobody else’s. Her best friend wakes up from his coma acting like a completely different person. Caught in a world that’s a mix of familiar and supernatural, she must confront what she will—or won’t—do to bring him back and stare down her own perceived inadequacies to face a couple of tenacious demons, figurative and literal.
Everything she thought she knew about reality will change as she walks the line between past and present, fear and faith, love and loyalty.
And by the end of a heartbreaking year, she might be forced to realize “normal” in the conventional sense of the word is the one thing she may never achieve.
Coming into this book from the first two where my verdict is still out on how much I like them, I'm not sure how to do this review with out sounding like I hated the book, because I didn't. I'm just not sure how I feel about it.
This book was definitely an improvement, for me, from the last book. The multiple POV's was done quite well, I liked getting to know Conner a little better as well as Nate and Olga and kind of who they could have been if they had all survived the first time around.
There were aspects of this book that didn't make sense to me, and some of the things that happened were just too convenient, and parts of the dialog were slightly awkward in my opinion. The book got much better around the second half when we see things from Conner and Nate's POV more than Olga's.
I appreciated that at least the first half of the book was a little lighter in the religion. The ending was a bit scattered for me. There was this thing that happened with Olga, and her friend Nicole figured it out and it's something that if it stopped being an issue suddenly, then it would raise questions. And when it was solved the was no questions raised about it, it was just never talked about again, also I'm was never sure if them being alive again was some other kind of test, or if they really were brought back to life in this book. It might have been explained, and I just missed it though.
Don't let my reservations hinder you from checking these books out. Most of my issues are biased around me not really being religious, I'm more agnostic, than religious. These books were fun to read, and I can understand why most other readers of these books loved them.
About Jamie Ayres:
Jamie Ayres writes young adult paranormal love stories by night and teaches young adults as a public school teacher by day.
When not at home on her laptop or at school, she can often be found at a local book store grabbing random children and reading to them. So far, she has not been arrested for this.
She lives in southwest Florida with her prince charming, two children (sometimes three based on how Mr. Ayres is acting), and a basset hound. She spent her youthful summers in Grand Haven, Michigan and this setting provided the inspiration for her debut novel, 18 Things.
She really does have grandmothers named Olga and Gay but unlike her heroine, she’s thankfully not named after either one of them. She loves lazy pajama days, the first page of a good book, stupid funny movies, and sharing stories with fantastic people like you.
Find Jamie Ayres Online:
So this is part of a series?
ReplyDeleteYeah, its the third in the series. The first are 18 Things, and `18 Truths.
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