Review: Fallen by Lauren Kate

Tags: YA, paranormal, romance, angels

Summary

Luce must spend her senior year at reform school after her boyfriend dies in a mysterious fire. She suspects that the dark shadows that have tormented her all her life had something to do with it. When she meets supernaturally gorgeous Daniel, she feels a familiar longing, making her believe they have met before. Although Cam is clearly interested in her, Luce only wants Daniel, who runs both hot and cold. He tries to keep Luce at a distance, telling her that the truth would kill her as it has many times before.


Review

I won't say that Fallen was a perfect book, because it wasn't. There were flaws. And when I say there were flaws, I mean that there were a lot of them.

The intro to this book, though not hooking, was so well-written, that I knew I had to read on. Only when I got to the first chapter, I found out that the characters in the intro were not the same as the ones in the first chapter.

Instead, we our introduced to a girl named Luce, who is at a reform school for a reason she doesn't like to talk to about, to anyone. The story starts off a bit slow, but the characters are interesting enough to hold your attention. One of those characters being Arriane, a seemingly crazy girl, who shows Luce the ropes of Sword & Cross.

Things don't seem to pick up until we meet Daniel, a boy who doesn't know Luce from Eve, and yet he flips her off, when she happens to catch his gaze.

Fallen was, I'll admit, a well-written novel. The descriptions were rich and vivid, but some characters and their relationships with others weren't as developed as they should have been.

There is a love triangle in this book.

If you don't know this by now, I love love triangles. I live for them, and I try to have a few of them in my novels, if it fits. But anyways, in my opinion, Miss Kate, did not do a good job with forming Luce's relationships with two seemingly gorgeous guys. Daniel, a boy who could care less about her, and Cam, a boy who likes her but whom she doesn't return the affection.

As I said, Daniel didn't care about her, sometimes he treated her like dirt, and yet she continued to like him. I mean COME ON. If a guy, treated me half as bad as Daniel treated her, I would not be attracted to him anymore.

And the author tried to explain that by saying that Luce felt like she knew him from somewhere. Forget that. Daniel didn't make sense as a love interest at first, and Cam, well I liked him. He seemed like a genuine bad boy, but he was also a little bit too nice for me, and after a while, I kinda figured out that he wasn't as nice as he appeared to be.

Some of the characters in this book were just THAT predictable.

All in all, Fallen was an okay book. There were a lot of flaws, and even though this book was well-written, it lacked in all the other areas. I will say that there was a good amount of romance, and that there were some scenes that took my breath away.

The minor characters, like Luce's parents could have been more concrete, because they were a little bland, and remember I said that Sword & Cross was a reform school? Well, it didn't feel like it. Sure there were the rules and regulations, but it didn't seem like there were other kids in the school, because Luce only ever talked about a certain group of people.

I liked the way the book ended, but the scenes before the ending were corny and rushed and you could really tell that it was planned out, but not executed as strong it should have been.

I give Fallen a 3/5 because it was a good read, but it just wasn't as good as I wanted it to be.