My rating: 6/10 stars
So I decided to give the Lux series by Jennifer L.
Armentrout another try, since I’d already actually read the first two books in
the series but then stopped. I enjoyed Obsidian a lot more this time
around than the first time, although I will say that I don’t entirely remember the
first time I read it that much.
You can definitely tell that this is a YA book, and it carries
quite a few tropes with it that kind of annoy me now that I’m a bit older. I
will first start with the negative things that I didn’t like so much and then
talk about the stuff that I did like.
First off, the writing itself isn’t really particularly spectacular. It
acts as a vehicle for the story and doesn’t really do anything much or add any
value beyond that, unfortunately. Obsidian also very eerily mirrors Twilight
in a variety of ways. We have a female YA protagonist who has just moved to
a small town from Florida with a single parent. She then proceeds to meet a
very strange family that appears to carry a mysterious secret and finds out
that they have supernatural powers. The sexy non-human male potential love
interest then proceeds to save her on numerous occasions, always lying about his
powers (“you must have been imagining things”) which confuses her. She
then eventually learns the truth and then must remain under protection of this
strange supernatural family because the enemies of their kind are after her. In
the end, she then decides to do something rather stupid (although I will say
that Bella was a lot more stupid than Katy) in order to protect these
people whom she now loves. Dee is a very obvious Alice. Daemon is none other
than Edward, although a douchebag-version of him. And Ash is Rosalie.
Katy isn’t really a Bella, though, which I appreciate. She is actually a quite well-likeable protagonist. I especially loved
that she (like me) is bother a blogger and YouTuber who talks about books. She
isn’t an entirely helpless character and – considering the circumstances of the
Arum/Luxen war – is actually not bad at protecting herself.
There were also a few other typical teen supernatural YA
book tropes that are kind of getting a bit old. In no particular order, these
are:
·
The “you’re not like the other humans” trope
·
The protagonist girl is getting sexually harassed,
and borderline raped and then the swoony hot YA male love interest comes to
save her
·
The “You’re a special/interesting girl because you
love comic books and other un-typically girly things” trope
·
The “I used to be a perfect 4.0 GPA student”
trope
·
The complaining about how curvy one is trope
Also, am I the only one who is getting very confused by the
sheer amount of suspicious conversations that supernatural people in YA books
have around the protagonist, wanting to hide their secret from them and thinking
that they are being inconspicuous (“I told you we should have left her at
home, she’s a liability!”). And then they act shocked when said protagonist
figures out that they are hiding a mysterious secret. I’m also equally
flabbergasted at the fact that Katy and other YA protagonists usually are very
dumb and don’t realize that they are being talked about until much later.
But onto the good stuff. I did really like Katy as a
character. And I also really loved her relationship with Dee. Furthermore, the
lore around the Luxen/Arum seems quite interesting. I’m definitely intrigued by
how that will develop in the later books.
I will say that I really didn’t like Daemon in this book
(yet). At the beginning, he really was a huge asshole towards her, which really
bugged me, especially because she still constantly talked about his looks (it’s
like we get it, he’s hot!). Later on in the book, when it began rather clear
that the way he acts towards her is quite obviously just an act, I did think
they were a bit cute together, and I could feel the shipping well up inside of me.
But he definitely has a a lot of changes to go through until he is love-interest
worthy for me. I was really glad that they didn’t end up together at the end,
which is quite unlike YA novels. I really loved that Katy stood up for herself and
basically outed his hot/cold act. Props to her.
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