Title: Thief of Lies
Author: Brenda Drake
Series: Library Jumpers #1
Publisher: Entangled Teen
Publication date: January 5, 2016
Format: Kindle | 400 pages
Genre: YA | Fantasy
Gia Kearns would rather fight with boys than kiss them. That is, until Arik, a leather clad hottie in the Boston Athenaeum, suddenly disappears. While examining the book of world libraries he abandoned, Gia unwittingly speaks the key that sucks her and her friends into a photograph and transports them into a Paris library, where Arik and his Sentinels - magical knights charged with protecting humans from the creatures traveling across the gateway books - rescue them from a demonic hound.
Jumping into some of the world's most beautiful libraries would be a dream come true for Gia, if she weren't busy resisting her heart or dodging an exiled wizard seeking revenge on both the Mystik and human worlds. Add a French flirt obsessed with Arik and a fling with a young wizard, and Gia must choose between her heart and her head, between Arik's world and her own, before both are destroyed.
My thoughts:
This was, I'm sorry to say, not a great read to start off the year with. I had so many problems with it, I can't even remember what I liked about it.
What I didn't like about this read ended up coming together into this convoluted mess where I started to hate any and all the characters and whatever was going on made no sense to me. It became so tedious to read and that, in turn, frustrated me to no end so it was just a cycle of generally not enjoying myself.
I will say, at the beginning, I liked the characters. I liked the relationships they had going and I liked all the different personalities going on. Arik in particular.
I think where it started to go downhill for me was when I noticed this repitition of the characters doing the same thing and generally having the same conversations. Not just in the sense that they would go to the same places over and over again but in the sense that every single supporting character was in some kind of romantic relationship. Why? There were a lot of characters to be paired up. So throughout the read there was no end to the protagonist noticing how other characters felt about each other, being curious about it, and asking if that's the case. Like 500 times. Not really, but it felt like it after a while.
The pacing was also a big problem for me. As in, there was none. So much happens in this book that I couldn't keep up and got so confused. It made everything seem so muddled and of course that caused me to see the characters as unbelievable and unrelatable since I was so confused but they were taking stuff all in their stride.
It might have been me, but the world this book was set in wasn't clear enough. I was fine at the beginning, but when things started happening too quickly I felt like a runner who'd been left behind after tripping up. I was just watching everything else race ahead of me. Everything going on was meant to be exciting! There was action - fighting sequences left and right, magic training, people being kidnapped and endless romances. The pacing of this read killed all of it. By the way, pair all that with the introduction of a love triangle. No thanks.
I genuinely feel this book needed to be cut in half. I can even imagine at what point in the story it would have been perfect to end it at. Everything could have happened at a slower, more relative pace and I most likely wouldn't have had anywhere near as much of a problem as I did.
All in all this was a disappointing read that had a lot of potential. The original aspect of 'library jumpers' held no excitement when I could see no end in sight to the story.
My rating: 4/10
Brenda Drake:
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