Fallen Review

Fallen
- Lauren Kate

Publisher: Kindle

What if the person you were meant to be with could never be yours? 17-year-old Lucinda falls in love with a gorgeous, intelligent boy, Daniel, at her new school, the grim, foreboding Sword & Cross . .

I was really looking forward to Fallen – I’ve seen so many positive reviews and thought it would make a nice change from teenaged vampires. Sadly,  I was wrong. The story is as similar as many of the other teenage love stories out there – Luce is torn between two good-looking boys – one who is alternatively hot and cold to her but that she is attracted to and one who is always nice but doesn’t get her heart racing as much. Once this is has been set up, however, for large portions of book nothing much happens. She goes to classes. Has various encounters with the two guys but nothing really occurs. Then suddenly in the final quarter of the book things really change with a number of revelations about most of the characters we’ve met so far (making most of what we’ve learnt so far irrelevant and silly) and then there’s a huge battle where nothing is resolved.

The sudden change in where story was jarring to me and didn’t really make me feel for the characters at all – in fact the only character I liked was Penn and she didn’t feature heavily. I suppose I’m the wrong age group for this type of story – as much as I love YA – and there are some fab books out there (Try Fire by Kristin Cashore) this one left me a little cold. I don’t really buy into love at first sight in teenage books – I’m always tempted to say it’s hormones! (Yes, I am a horribly jaded adult now!) - so I guess the romance of it all passed me by. Still I went through it fairly quickly and the 'twist' when it came was fairly innovative and different.  

Even if I’d missed the much published release of the sequel – Torment – I could tell there was another book planned as nothing was really resolved. There was no stand alone story in this book that was tied up – actually the book opens wider at the end and leaves you guessing what will happen next. There are loads of questions that need answering but I’m not sure I care enough to pick up the next book.

Recommended for fans of LJ Smith's Vampire Diaries books & Christopher Pike. 5 out of 10