Genre: High Fantasy

A heroine set out for revenge; a dark and mysterious, more or less evil love interest; dragons known as Dracyr – this should have been just my kind of YA high fantasy romance novel. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. Granted, it didn’t take me long to get into the novel and at first, I inhaled it – until I put it down. The more I thought about what I’d read, the more difficult it became to get myself to continue. The concept of the Dracyr is very cool, but that’s about the only redeeming quality of the novel. Not only was I disappointed that the protagonist was a far cry from the kickass assassin I’d expected, the romance had me cringe and my skin crawl …

What the hell?! I’m still baffled and it hurts my soul to write this since Lynn Raven is one of my favourite authors, but in my humble opinion, this novel is a disaster! Seelenkuss reads like a first draft in need of heavy editing with a plot all over the place, characters so flat they’re almost translucent, and world building that had me scratching my head …

I really enjoyed Mistborn: The Final Empire. It made me smile, laugh out loud, scream, tear out my hair, and cry rivers of tears – and yes, these are all good attributes in a novel. And yet, I’m not as crazy about it as everyone else I know. Maybe my expectations were a little too high with all the buzz around me. Maybe I was too wary about becoming yet again the odd one out. And as much as I tried to love it, somehow I felt distant. I wasn’t able to completely immerse myself in this fantastic world and really connect with the characters. I see the beauty of the novel, I see why everyone else loves it. I can write a raving review – as an onlooker. Unfortunately, for me personally, it just didn’t click (which isn’t as bad as it sounds. It just means that it didn’t have that certain something for me).

I can’t remember how I first learned about this novel. I can’t remember what made me buy it. However, I remember that I ordered it at my local bookshop one early summer shortly before I went on holidays in France with my Mum and my sister. I remember, because I started this novel when we hit the road and couldn’t put it aside. I read it while we drove through Germany, I read it at that strange and blazing hot hostel in Freiburg, I read it on our way through half of France, and I finished literally the second we arrived at the campsite in the Gorges du Chassezsac. It was the magic of the novel that glued me to its pages. Since then, including this one, I reread it three times . . .

This novel is the great surprise of 2013. A wonderful (fairy)tale about good and evil, friendship, love, and beauty with complex lovable and loathsome characters that also happens to be magnificently written. It is both hilariously funny and heartbreakingly sad, predictable and utterly unexpected.

Himmel aber auch, das war eine unerträgliche Tortur! Ich liebe es, Bücher mehrmals zu lesen, aber das war wirklich das allererste Mal, dass ich an manchen Stellen einfach nicht weiterlesen wollte, das Buch sogar für ein paar Tage zur Seite legen musste, weil ich einfach nicht ertragen konnte, was als nächstes passieren würde. Und warum das Ganze? Tja, weil ich bis über beide Ohren in einen fiktiven Charakter verliebt bin, dem ich so einiges gerne erspart hätte. Klingt verrückt? Tja, ist aber so. Denn wenn man mich fragt, warum der Roman zu meinen Lieblingsbüchern gehört, kann ich das ganz einfach in einem einzigen Wort beantworten: Mordan!

Oh my, such a disappointment! After a wonderful, exotic, very gloomy and atmospheric 100 pages that got my hopes up, the awesomeness petered out. The world, the story, the characters – everything had so much potential! Unfortunately, the writing couldn’t live up to it and soon everything lost its glamour: the enthralling mysteries became far too obvious, the rugged beauty had to make way for a boarding school atmosphere and could never truly recover, and the characters turned out to be as flat as a pancake . . .