Reading Teen

First of all, let me just say, this cover is GORGEOUS! I adore it! It's even prettier in person. Very nice job!This is a tough review for me, because it was a tough book for me. I had conflicting feelings about it because I really liked the idea for the story, and there were things that I really enjoyed about it, but mostly I was just really bored with it. It took me a week to read, not because it was bad, but because it was just lacking that I MUST READ IT NOW quality. I wanted to know where the story was going, and what would happen, but most of the time I just wanted it to hurry up and end, which makes me sad because I really, REALLY wanted to like this book.At first I felt like it had an almost Wicked Lovely-slash-The Mortal Instruments-slash-The Iron Fey feel about it. It certainly had many of the same elements. I was surprised to find out that this book was about Faeries. I love faerie books, and reading something along the lines of the aforementioned books is appealing to me. However, the problem with writing a book that is so similar in feel and storyline to those, is that you then have to live up to the extraordinary writing ability of the likes of Melissa Marr, Cassandra Clare and Julie Kagawa.It may be that it is suffering from Series Syndrome. Meaning that so much of it is set up for future books. But, for me, I need each book in a series to have its own excitement. Especially the first book. It really has to grab me for me to want to read the next ones in the series. For such a short book, I felt like this story took forever to unfold. For example, one of the major points in the synopsis is that Donna's friend, Navin, is stolen by the wood-elves. But this doesn't even happen until the book is 2/3 over. The first part of the book was just basically about Donna meeting and falling for Xan (who smokes.....yuck), but their relationship is just flat. There was no excitement to it. No tension.I really liked the idea of alchemy being used as a magic. Especially in the context of the Faeries, who are "allergic" to iron. The fact that Donna has the metal surgically implanted in her is a really cool idea. But her arms hardly even come into play in the book. And when they finally do, it's kind of anti-climactic. Maybe there will be more to this aspect in the following books.Overall, I thought this book had a lot of potential, and a good storyline, but it was just missing that spark for me. If you like faerie books, though, you might want to give this one a try.Andyehttp://ReadingTeen.net/