Book Review: Firelight

TITLE: Firelight
Book 1 in the Draki series
AUTHOR: Sophie Jordan
PUBLISHED: 2010
CATEGORY: Young adult
GENRE: shifters, romance, urban fantasy
PREMISE: Jacinda is a draki who falls in love with a human who hunts her kind.
MY REVIEW: Damn, I wanted to like this one so much. It does have stuff going for it. The writing is good, the Draki stuff was mildly interesting, and I did find the family dynamics interesting to a point. But I'm sorry, where the hell was all that creativity that people kept crowing about last year? From what I saw it was pretty much same old same old. In fact, this book is basically like another book released the same year at about the same time: Nightshade by Andrea Cremer (which I also did not like). I was getting extreme deja vu while reading this.
It doesn't help that like Nightshade, it gave me the old "I'm a powerful girl" song and dance but when push came to shove, Jacinda was like all the other whiny heroines whose world revolved around her guy and when other guys showed up and bossed her around, she took it (and all other girls other then Jacinda were shallow and had no depth according to Jacinda). Also like Nightshade the main point is the "epic romance" that doesn't have much basis and there's not much other plot going on. Also I'm sorry but I wanted to smack every single one of these selfish characters. Jacinda was selfish, her mother was selfish, her sister was DEFINITELY selfish (and a bitch), the Draki were selfish, and the hunters were selfish. About the only one I didn't want to go die in a fire was Will but he was so underdeveloped I didn't gain any real feelings for him at all.
It was just a huge disappointment for me. It's okay if you just want a mindless romance novel. But if you want something good...I'd look elsewhere.
WHO SHOULD READ: fans of Nightshade, dragon fans, Twilight fans
MY RATING: Two and a half out of Five drakis