Mini Reviews - Unraveled, The Chosen One

Been meaning to review these two titles for a while, if I don't review either of them soon then they won't get done, so rather than try and force full reviews that I just can't come up with right now, here's mini ones to give you an idea of what I thought.

Unraveled by Gena Showalter - Intertwined #2. Spoilers for book one ahead!

"For once, sixteen-year-old Aden Stone has everything he's ever wanted:
A home.
Friends.
The girl of his dreams.
Too bad he's going to die...

Since coming to Crossroads, Oklahoma, former outcast Aden Stone has been living the good life. Never mind that one of his best friends is a werewolf, his girlfriend is a vampire princess who hungers for his blood, and he's supposed to be crowned Vampire King - while still human! Well, kind of.

With four - oops, three now - human souls living inside his head, Aden has always been "different" himself. These souls can time-travel, raise the dead, possess another's mind and, his least favourite these days, tell the future.

The forecast for Aden? A knife through the heart."

I liked Intertwined a lot by the end and was really looking forward to finding out what would happen next for Aden, his souls, Mary, Riley and Victoria. Unraveled was a really good follow up for the most part, but it's long at 572 pages, and I found myself feeling very ready to move on long before I finished. It actually is good all the way through, not often dragging, but because I had other things going on it took me four days to finish and I get antsy staying on the same book for that long. I like Aden and Victoria, but more often than not, I was far more interested in what was going on with Riley and Mary. Riley is by far my favourite character (he's a werewolf and I'm a wolf-girl so this really isn't surprising) and with Mary being his love interest and having a complicated but great storyline, I'm wanting her story as well. If the book was purely about them I think I'd be perfectly happy.

There is a lot going on in the book, and it's got a fair bit of action, but it does feel like it takes a while to really get anywhere at times. There were some great moments, and some great twists as well. Overall I did really enjoy the book and I'm really looking forward to book three, Twisted (out 2011), because I want more Riley. I think I'd have been better off reading this at a time where I could have read it over 2 days instead and I probably would have gotten a lot more out of it. Still, it's a good read, good follow up to Intertwined, just a little too long and drawn out for me this time. If you liked Intertwined then this should be a must, it's a great continuation of the story.

Rating: 7/10


The Chosen One by Carol Lynch Williams - received for review from UK Book Tours.

"Thirteen-year-old Kyra has grown up in an isolated polygamous community without questioning her father’s three wives and her twenty brothers and sisters. Or at least without questioning them much—if you don’t count her secret visits to the Mobile Library on Wheels to read forbidden books, or her meetings with the boy she hopes to choose for herself instead of having a man chosen for her. But when the Prophet decrees that Kyra must marry her 60-year-old uncle—who already has six wives—Kyra must make a desperate choice in the face of violence and her own fears of losing her family."

I'm not entirely sure what to make of this book. It's a short read, barely 200 pages, and it's certainly got the edge to make it a very emotional read. But I found after a short time that while I wanted to know what happened, I was quite happy to skip to the end and read it. It wasn't too hard to see what would happen, and when I did get to the end (I did end up more or less reading it right through) it ended abruptly with little clean up. I liked Kyra, I felt very sorry for her, and the other kids, because they really didn't know any better than what was told to them. I know this should have been a read that made me think, that made me care more for those who are in this situation in reality, but somehow the book just didn't work for me. Wasn't a lack of care on my part, because it was uncomfortable, painful reading when I was in to it. But...I don't know. Maybe it was made too obvious who we were meant to hate, what we were meant to feel. It wasn't a bad read exactly, but it didn't work for me.

Rating: 4/10