I received a copy from Netgalley.

 

It’s been a long time since I’ve started a book and finished it in the same day. I’ve only rated three books five stars this year and this was one of them. I love rich people stories and even more ones about regular people who are thrown into that over the top glamorous world.

 

In this book teenager Avery, a studios, smart girl is just looking to finish high school and earn a college scholarship. She lives with her older sister Libby and Libby’s questionable asshole boyfriend Drake. While she adores her sister she hates the boyfriend who’s cruel and manipulative in that making you think everything wrong is your fault when it’s not way.

 

Then everything changes when Grayson Hawthorne shows up with a request for Avery and Libby to attend his grandfather’s will reading. His multi billionaire grandfather. Avery is dumbfounded. She’s never heard of the man. And yet finds out she’s been left his fortune. From sleeping in her car she’s suddenly the richest teenager in the world.

 

Much to the chagrin on the Hawthorne family, the four grandsons, their mother and her sister. Naturally they’re furious. Avery has to now figure out how this all happened, and no one in the Hawthorne family is happy she’s there. There’s a complex mystery to solve, clues are left for Avery and the boys.

 

This is one of those compulsive you have to know what’s going on mysteries. I can’t say much for character development, everything felt a little generic and seen a million times before in the family dynamic. I didn’t get much of a sense of personality from Avery other than resourceful, smart and determined. Though her reactions to the situations she found herself thrown into were very believable.

 

What drove this novel forward for me was the mystery. It’s impossible to recap without being spoilery, the plot is so twisty turny. It has a brilliant narrative that makes the reader keep guessing. While the characters aren’t very fleshed out, there was some delightful banter throughout, the relationships grew more complex throughout the characters. I didn’t guess who the baddie was and it’s one of those…why didn’t I see this coming from a mile away?!?!? reveals. The tension builds wonderfully throughout to the final climax…which was almost in a weird way a bit anticlimactic. It does however, leave on a cliffhanger. I need more.

 

Thank you to Penguin Random House Children’s UK.

YA and I are in a weird relationship lately, and it's definitely making it harder for me to review books like Little White Lies. This is a book that made me giggle, endeared me to its characters, but then ran way longer than it probably should have. It's rough to sit in that middle ground where you genuinely loved the majority of a story, but there are just small things that make it rougher to finish than you expected. That's this book in a nutshell.

I mean, this book could have probably done with a bit of culling in the plot department. The mystery built around Sawyer and her newly acquired family members started out with a bang. However, as the story progressed, it felt more and more stagnant. The tension that Barnes built up so well at the beginning, that sense of growth that was tied to Sawyer, just slowly simmered off. I was frustrated towards the middle of this story, and really ready to skim. I kept on though and, I can say, the end of this book rewarded me. So, if you feel the same, just keep going. It's worth it.

Also I should note that I appreciated how well Barnes rounds out these characters. Debutantes of any sort have the ability to be vapid girls who have no personality to speak of. In this case, the girls have a wonderful amount of depth. Especially since Sawyer, an outsider to this whole world of pearls and balls, comes into the picture early on. I loved the friendship and the family relationships that came to life on the page. Each girl had their own little quirk that spoke to what we'd expect from the debutante scene: the mean girl, the pretty but spacey one, and the prim one. However as time went on, each one of them broke out of the mold slowly but surely. It was so refreshing.

The actual ending of the book did cause a bit of huffing and puffing from me. I knew that this was an ongoing series, and so I was thoroughly prepared for a cliffhanger ending. What happened instead was the exact opposite. Everything wraps up with a neat bow, and this book just ends. No fanfare, no excitement, but then isn't that just like real life? I suppose I've been groomed to expect book ending frustration. I'm not sure if that's funny or sad.

Anyway, this is well worth a read. It's a charming book and, while it has its flaws, it pushes the envelope on what has been done with characters of this type before. I honestly can't wait for the next book.

Holy. Cow. That was intense! Slow to pick up but definitely worth it!

(Whoops, the character I kept calling "Derek" is actually named Dean. I think I fixed all the instances.)

 

The Naturals is YA Criminal Minds with some of the usual “secret school for special teens” mixed in. I read an ARC copy I picked up at a conference several years ago (yes, I'm terrible about reading ARCs, which is why I rarely request them).

When Cassie was 12, she entered her mother’s dressing room only to discover a bloody crime scene, but no body. Her mother's body and murderer (because how could she still be alive after losing that much blood?) were never found. Cassie is now 17 and living with her father’s family. She doesn’t feel like she fits in, but she also doesn’t want to be the focus of her family’s often overbearing love and concern.

Ever since she was little, Cassie has had a knack for noticing little details about people and figuring things out about them using those details. She used to use her ability to help her mother, who worked as a psychic. Since her mother’s death, she hasn’t used her skills for much beyond privately guessing things about customers at the diner where she works, so she’s both intrigued and suspicious when a handsome boy gives her an FBI agent’s business card.

The agent presents her with an offer she can’t resist: she can become part of his “Naturals” program, a team of teens with natural skills that take most adults years of training to learn. Because the program members are all minors, they only get to deal with cold cases, but Cassie still jumps at the chance to do something good and useful with her abilities. However, she and the other program members can’t resist getting more and more involved in a difficult, and possibly personal, active case.

Although this book made for smooth and easy reading, I felt like I’d already seen/read a lot of it before. The school-like setting and characters reminded me of books like L.J. Smith’s Dark Visions series and Kelley Armstrong’s The Summoning. As for the serial killer/criminal profiling aspects, I’ve already mentioned Criminal Minds, and one particular revelation probably won’t come as a surprise to fans of Barry Lyga’s Jasper Dent books. Dean’s self-loathing and efforts to push Cassie away reminded me strongly of Stephenie Meyer’s Edward Cullen.

It wasn’t bad; it just didn’t feel terribly original. It didn’t really help that a lot of this book was geared towards setting the stage: introducing the characters, the lingo, and a little of the criminal profiling thought process. The really interesting stuff, the active case, didn’t come up until fairly late in the story.

Still, the Naturals and their abilities interested me. Lia was a natural liar and lie detector. Sloane was a walking collection of statistics who couldn’t help looking for patterns. Michael could read people’s emotions via tiny details in their body language and facial expressions. Dean, like Cassie, was a natural profiler. Sadly, because of the book’s first-person POV, only Dean and Cassie’s abilities received much detailed attention, and Lia and Sloane nearly faded into the background once the love triangle between Cassie, Dean, and Michael was introduced. This was especially awkward considering that Michael had an on-again, off-again relationship with Lia.

I’ll probably read the next book in the series at some point, but I sincerely hope that the love triangle either disappears or fades into the background a lot. It felt like the boys were snapping over Cassie like dogs over a bone. I got the impression that she was leaning more towards Dean, so the kissing scene with Michael near the end really bugged me - it was stupid and seemed entirely intended to add just enough fuel to the love triangle to make the collection of characters in the final showdown more possible. Here's hoping that future books also give Lia and Sloane more of a chance to shine. Sloane seemed sweet, in an awkward sort of way, and I really wanted Lia to be more than the snarky girl potentially standing between Cassie and Michael.

 

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

Rating: 5 Stars

OMG what an A.M.A.Z.I.N.G end to a F.A.N.T.A.S.T.I.C series! I am really sad that this series is over, but I will certainly be rereading it again soon.

What gives this book 5 stars?
1.) The cover is perfect, and I love how it matches all the other covers in the series with a general theme.
2.) The building romance between Cassie and Dean, pretty much throughout the series is perfect and satisfying!
3.) I loved the overall plot. The building suspense throughout the series in regards to Cassie's mother was a surprising and unexpected end in this series.

I must say this would make a great YA TV series! Just sayin'!! :D