In my never-ending quest for a YA book that doesn't seem to be just plain stupid, I found this little nugget.
Well, this is not true but as I have trouble finding new reading material I, again and again, become tempted to try another well-rated interesting-sounding YA but am almost always badly disappointed.
In comparison to the rest of popular YA, this one was pretty good.
Nowadays this would've probably been tagged as new adult tho.

At the time of writing this, I have already completed the first 3 books and the 4th seems to be the same story from another perspective. I am a bit torn on how to rate this one. Just looking at this first book I'd rate it a high 3 stars but with the context of the two following books its barely 3 stars. Looking at how the third volume ends it seems this was initially only planned as a trilogy but was continued later.

Onto the bad things I noticed as always:

It suffers a bit from mary sue but the mc is still flawed enough to keep her interesting if you lean in that direction. (mc with lots of special things about him/her.)

What stood out the most to me was a flaw I commonly see in YA. Namely this weird split in maturity. Most of the time she acts consistently with a believable maturity, sometimes making somewhat stupid decisions which match her personality, but now and then especially in heart to heart sections everyone suddenly acts incredibly and unnaturally mature which throws me off. It repeatedly prevents the dreaded miscommunication-that-leads-to-disaster trope (the story is not completely safe from that one either tho) but dialogues suffering from that seem forced and stilted.

Another thing is that there are quite a lot of strands of the story that just lead nowhere. They are completely irrelevant to the story and don't serve any other purpose either.

There are a few contradictions in the magic but as its clearly a very soft, touchy-feely kind of magic system, this generally isn't a big problem.
In the first book, we know so little about the magic that this is easily ignored but because the author has no problems to badly violate her own rules for a bit of extra dramatic effect, especially in climactic scenes, it becomes worse and worse the more we learn about the parameters of different abilities which results in bad inconsistencies in later books.

To me, it seems like most of this series is discovery-written without a whole lot of notes that were actually consulted later on.

There is a lot of plot convenience happening but it didn't negatively stand out to me. I can not say if that was because I was somewhat preoccupied with other things while listening to the audiobook (aka tired) or because it is actually well hidden. ( )

Loved it! My favorite part about any book is when it keeps me on my toes, keeps me interested, and can make me laugh. This one definitely covered all 3! It's a must read. I'm ordering the second book as soon as I finish this review! ( )

Sara Grey has some secrets. One, she is a healer, but she doesn't know where the power came from. Two, she believes in trolls, imps, goblins, and more recently, werewolves and vampires. Sara is hunted by a vampire one night named Eli, and he isn't giving up. Her best friends have some secrets of their own, which eventually come out during a battle of life and death. To top it all off, there's this Mohiri hunter that keeps hanging around with his buddy that is trying to save Sara from the evil Vampire, but Sara is a strong-willed high school kid. She wants answers about her father's death, and now wants to know why she just can't be normal and do normal teenage stuff. ( )

Very different! I enjoyed the uniqueness of the book (although the first chapter was pretty strange and I almost quit reading). I didn't LOVE the book though. It was different and for the most part kept me interested, but I just didn't love it. ( )

I really enjoyed the mystery and paranormal aspects, though I felt there was a lot of excess chatter. Will definitely read the next one though. ( )