Thank you to NetGalley for providing a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review!
Yet again, I prove myself incapable to keep my own time frames, and ran out of time on this book before it was archived. I swear, every time I get a book on NetGalley, life immediately decides that I don’t need to have free time or drive to read. Anyway. I’d gone on my usual hunt through the libraries to see which books I could borrow and read, so that I could get them the reviews they’d been promised, and was lucky enough to find THE PATH KEEPER at one of them. And when my hold came through, I curled up in my new reading chair and set to reading.
And is so often the case, I devoured it in two nights.
I had no idea what I was really getting into, from the synopsis of the story. YA novel, two kids not supposed to be in love, very dramatic. Okay, cool! I’m on board for that. “The brutality of GAME OF THRONES,” the blurb says.
…In a YA novel? I’m paying attention.
And I’ll argue that point, honestly. It’s brutal for a YA novel, sure. But it’s not Song of Ice and Fire. I can’t speak to the correlation to COURT OF THORNS AND ROSES since I haven’t read it yet, but I can also cast a bit of hesitation on the correlation to TWILIGHT too. Both forbidden romances of sorts, sure. But in such wildly different ways, it’s hard to think of them in the same breath. Edward has NOTHING on Zac.
NOTHING.
But I’m a sucker for reincarnation and angels, so it was easy for me to be dragged along by this story of a girl who meets a boy who changes her life, and the boy who knows he’s made all the wrong decisions and still can’t stop himself. It feels like Simmonds is trying a little too hard sometimes to make the story “grown-up” with the cursing and the sex, and while I suppose it fits, it doesn’t seem necessary? I do admit that this may be a personal bias, however, so it is what it is. We do get a glimpse of some of the past lives, and that can be a bit jarring when you’re not expecting it–and we have an interlude near the end of the book with a step-brother that I do not understand the purpose of in the slightest other than as a catalyst for other actions–which, given the subject matter, isn’t enough to warrant its inclusion.
But by the end of the book, I was still invested in our main characters, I was looking forward to seeing what happened, and I was off and running to Twitter to flail at the author since the next book isn’t out for MONTHS yet. So now I wait, to see where Zac and Ella’s story goes from here, how Lily and Leo will fit in, and what all happened in the past that led them to where we found them now.
Sign me up for the ARC list for SON OF SECRETS, please!
Rating: ***.5 – Definitely Worth a Look
I am not lost... 