Saturday, October 22, 2011

Unearthly by Cynthia Hand

Title: Unearthly
Author: Cynthia Hand
Publisher: HarperCollins/HarperTeen
Release Date: January 4, 2011
Pages: 435 pages (Hardback)


Review:


All I can say is wow!

This was a beautiful surprise; I could not put it down. A friend of mine lent it to me for the weekend and told me to read it. I have to say that when it comes to angel books, I am a bit weary. I have had bad luck with angel books and was not sure I could handle another one. After much nagging, my friend finally convinced me to read it, and my God, am I glad she did.

The story starts of at a very slow pace with Clara explaining the whole angel thing, thankfully without info dumping, and allowing the readers to get to know her and her family. The story is written in present tense, which threw me off a bit because I prefer past, but I adjusted after a few chapters and really grew to like Clara’s “voice.” Although it was a fairly slow book, I felt that Cynthia Hand did such an amazing job with her descriptions and characterization. I was able to really connect with Clara and her family on a personal level. Lately, most heroines are whiny and can’t take care of themselves, but they are also perfect and receive the attention of every boy around them, Clara was quite the opposite. She was strong and independent, and life sucked a lot of the time for her (thus the orange hair.) She was believable and I really liked her character.

The romance in this novel was extremely complicated and interesting. I had a feeling there would be a love triangle, but I soon realized it was much bigger than teen indecisiveness and all around stupidity that usually comes from teen novels with love triangles and supernatural beings. The friendships and romances were highly believable and had me wanting to meet a few of these characters in real life. I also really liked Clara’s friends. They were not just your run-of-the-mill vanilla characters used as plot devices; they were interesting and had purpose. I was surprised at how the romance was handled. In most books the girl protagonist meets a hot guy whom she is destined to be with, then they fall in love for no reason, and some insanely awesome other guy gets screwed. This book was the opposite. She never really leads anyone on, and I was rooting for Tucker the whole time.

THANK YOU CYNTHIA HAND!

Photobucket

Wendy was sweet and reminded me a lot of my friends. She actually cared about the well being of her best friend, and wasn’t annoying or whiny. Angela was my favorite. People seemed to fear but respect her at the same time. As far as Tucker and Christian, I am torn. I loved Tucker’s whole country boy look, and sarcastic attitude towards Clara. You want to hate him at the beginning, but then I found myself just begging for scenes with him to come up. As far a Christian goes, I feel like I barely know him. I was appreciative that although she felt herself instantly attracted to him (bleh), she had good reason. The characters in this book were awesome, and I felt like I really knew them by the book’s finish.

Unearthly is one of those rare books that has a beautiful cover, angsty blurb, and major hype but is still surprisingly amazing. I was shocked, and that doesn’t happen very often to me anymore. I loved this book and definitely plan on getting my own copy and reading the rest of the series! I give this book 4 stars!

If you love this book as much as I did follow me and check out my other rants and reviews at Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/user/show/6118682-princess-kayla