Personal Demons - Lisa Desrochers

I picked this book up at Borders, and almost didn't buy it (the cover-yuck!). But, I sat down and started reading it for a little while and really got drawn in. The sequel comes out July 2011 - so far!

Published by Pan Macmillan Australia

RRP Au$18.99 - Borders, Angus & Robertson, Dymocks

-->Frannie Cavanaugh is a good Catholic girl - NOT. She got herself kicked out of Catholic school, and now she’s going to be tagged for hell. But, not because of her bad girl ways. She’s got power, the likes of which has only been seen twice before. 

Luc is the demon from Hell that has been sent to tag her soul. That shouldn’t be too hard, considering he’s flaming hot. Unfortunately for him, his boss has trust issues, and hasn’t told him that Frannie’s soul is extremely valuable. It’s not until Gabriel turns up – yes, that Gabriel – to tag her soul for Heaven that things really start to heat up. Frannie may not be a model Christian, but Heaven ain’t about to let her too easily.

Lisa Desrochers’ debut novel sets a scene in Personal Demons. It’s an infernal fight for the soul of one girl with a powerful talent. The idea in this story is very clever, and it’s complimented by great characters, chemistry and plenty of evil roaming the Earth.

Firstly, the characters in this story all seem to have some real issues. Some would say this was a bad thing, but I think it makes you want to get to know them better. They’re written with a little more intelligence and insight than most teen characters are these days, but Frannie and her human friends have a tolerable amount of annoying in them. Luc (Lucifer – ha!) and Gabe, the main ‘love’ interests in the story, are of course written to be perfect specimens of male  sexuality, but sexy at tow opposite ends of the scale. Luc is tall, shady, green-eyed, brown-haired temptation, and Gabe is blonde, blue-eyed, sweetness all around. Not that I’m complaining.

Carrying on from this, it seems that Frannie wasn’t given the right amount teenage hormones. There may be good teenage chemistry between her and Luc, her and Gabe, but I really question parts of these relationships. If a teenage girl was presented with a guy like Luc, would she be really smart enough to keep her panties to herself? And would an angel really be making out with a human at all? Outside of those relationships, what she has with her friends and other classmates is perfect. Not too much bitching, not too much Jockism. Frannie’s family aren’t mentioned too much, but they are justly, irritatingly conservative and judgemental of Luc. Yes, I know he’s a demon.

There’s a great lot of other demons visiting the upper realm, and going unnoticed. I feel that they’re really just there to make the story go faster. But I found them just a little bit of an inconvenience at first. Admittedly, they do become more important as the story goes on, and fill in the gaps until the real evil arrives. 

To be honest, I had no real issues with this book. It was a gripping and quick read, with a good amount of romance and actions. The ending, in regards to Luc, was a little disappointing. But, I’m sure it will lead on to something good in the sequels.

AH! But, the one things I absolutely HATE about this book is the cover. Don’t judge a book by it’s cover. Of course, but this cover is awful to the nth degree. The actors who are meant to be Frannie. Luc and Gabe are all about 10 years too old, and it seems to be set in the mid 90s. Who does this stuff? But, book and cover and all that stuff. Ignore the cover or rip it off.

I think this series is going to go far. It’s got some great themes and characters, Lisa’s writing style is very invigorating after some of the childish tosh I’ve read recently. She’s got something really good going on here. I’d recommend it to fans of Michelle Rowen.

Clare de Lune - Christine Johnson (spoilers)

This is a book by an author I've never read before. I picked it up because I do love a good werewolf tale. This is her first novel. Not that that means anything.

 

-->Clare has just found out that her mum is a werewolf. And so is she. And a bunch of other women, including one crazed blood-thirsty were that’s killing off the townsfolk. So when Clare’s mum decides to investigate the single wolf, things start to get a bit nasty, and Clare is forced to involve more people than she thought.

This book had a really promising idea to it. Female main character (not exactly strong, a little bratty), overbearing artist mother (annoyingly strict), the clued in yet clueless bimbo friend, and the gorgeous boyfriend who had no idea what was going on, but was still inadvertently supportive. Wait... there’s the problem. The characters were all a little too...normal? Plain? They had nothing interesting about them, nothing to make me want to know more about them. To add to that, it was obvious from the beginning who the “lone wolf” was. The only thing that might make the reader think otherwise is the hippie au pair that Clare’s mother has babysitting Clare while she’s away on glamorous photography jobs in Dubai.

There were a lot of scenes in here that at first seemed unnecessary, but in hindsight, they were meant to build understanding of relationships. These mostly consisted of Clare on the phone to her chit-chatting best friend, Clare back-talking to her military mum, Clare being shy with her hot boyfriend. Not very drawing. The only scenes that really caught my interest were the descriptions of Clare and her pack morphing into wolves and fighting as wolves. However, this doesn’t make up for the juvenile writing style on either side of the ‘morphing’ passages. It really needed something more than a few good fight scenes.

I was really disappointed with this one, and what’s worse is that I was really looking forward to reading it. Still, a book about werewolves it is. I recommend it for fans of Alyxandra Harvey.