Book Review: The Dark Divine

TITLE: The Dark Divine
Book 1 in the Dark Divine series
AUTHOR: Bree Despain
PUBLISHED: 2010
CATEGORY: Young adult
GENRE: werewolves, fantasy, romance
PREMISE: years ago, Daniel left leaving Grace heartbroken and big secrets among her family. Now he's back and those secrets are threatening to change everything she thought she knew.
MY REVIEW: I really wanted to like this book. The writing was good, it was nice seeing something that didn't involve vampires, and there were some interesting things going on. But I just didn't and I think it's a combination of things.
First is that it suffers from what I like to call Twilight-ism. I have a feeling this author was a Twilight fan and it shows because there were many elusions to the series, down to a scene that was outright stolen from it and Grace suffers from Bella Swanism like whoa (though she at least has SOME backbone. Not much, but some). It disapoints me too. Because I felt like there was a lot of potential in this and without the author trying to dumb it down by appealing to the Twilight crowd it could of been so much better.
The second major thing is that throughout it I felt like I was being preached at/condescended to and that there was much judgmenting going on. It got very annoying very fast. Then there were little things like I didn't like any of the characters (they were all annoying at some point, even Daniel, the one I liked most of all), it was very dull up till the last hundred pages or so and even that was slightly lackluster (another similarity to Twilight), the whole werewolves being a gift from God or whatever was so much of a stretch that I didn't buy it and much more.
But this is all mostly just because I wasn't really the audience for this series. Twilight fans (particularly the Team Jacob camp) will probably enjoy this immensely. Me, I just wanted more from it and so was slightly disappointed. Maybe the second one will be better...who knows? Like I said, there is potential here.
WHO SHOULD READ: Twilight fans, werewolf fans
MY RATING: Three out of Five moonstones

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