Review: Obsidian, A Lux Novel

Merry Christmas, kids. Review is going to be drastically less jolly, like most of the angry reviews are 

2 stars/5 stars 

 

Starting over sucks. 

When we moved to West Virginia right before my senior year, I’d pretty much resigned myself to thick accents, dodgy internet access, and a whole lot of boring.... until I spotted my hot neighbor, with his looming height and eerie green eyes. Things were looking up. 

And then he opened his mouth. 

Daemon is infuriating. Arrogant. Stab-worthy. We do not get along. At all. But when a stranger attacks me and Daemon literally freezes time with a wave of his hand, well, something…unexpected happens.  

The hot alien living next door marks me. You heard me. Alien. Turns out Daemon and his sister have a galaxy of enemies wanting to steal their abilities, and Daemon’s touch has me lit up like the Vegas Strip. The only way I'm getting out of this alive is by sticking close to Daemon until my alien mojo fades.  

If I don't kill him first, that is.

So Obsidian is getting a lot of love on Goodreads (4.23 average rating, last I checked). 

I disagree. 

I may or may not follow the crowd, but here's the outline of the story where everyone will probably understand where the issues lie to begin with. Insert a standard story template.

1. Beautiful (but she doesn't know it) girl moves to new neighborhood, with one parent. The other is either dead or divorced, or maybe a complicated mix of both.
2. Hot guy appears. Inhumanly hot. Girl starts swooning and dying and melting, and he opens his mouth and she immediately gets annoyed and finds some snappy comeback. Or something.
3. A nice sister to talk to! Yay, let's be BFF!
4. Why can they eat ice cream and so much nice food? Why are they so pretty?
5. Eh. What are they talking about while I am supposed to be asleep? Are they supernatural beings or something.
6. Somebody saved and healed me from dying. No prize for who guesses it.
7. That same somebody now has to be my shadow and we have plenty of moments.
8. Winds up in hospital, out again.
9. Bad guys. Called the dark. Revealed that inhumanly hot kids are in fact, inhuman. What a shock. I know, right?

And on it goes with unneeded tension. This author knows what to avoid, which is insta-love and happily ever afters. This author makes Cady (Cathy? Caty? I don't know.) like an author, what with book blogging and some books that she detests. And so on. Yet I don't see the point of dragging everything out enough. Sure, this author is really aware of everything now in YA Paranormal novels that are sorely lacking, but she hasn't picked up the challenge because this is classified as pretty much anything I've read. I'm also seeing lots of plot cliches that are potential cliffhangers and so-called "plot twists". We've been reading too much and these little details jut out, just begging to be noticed. 

I'm betting that Dawson is not really dead and he makes some return. 

Another infuriating thing is also using foreign language to give your -insert paranormal creature-  a name. Frankly I'm just sick of the light and the dark in which the light are the perfect, beautiful and peaceful residents while the dark are resentful, jealous creatures by nature. Remember, jealousy may be in the self but resentment takes actual interaction to be nurtured. I can't stand the fact that there are the evil, and then the victims, end of story. And using Latin to substitute for a name called "light" is both unoriginal, albeit fitting. 

I can't handle Paranormal YA fiction these days.

Posted on behalf of 
Catherine