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awakening nilles

Book Review: Awakening, by Melanie Nilles

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I’ve owned a copy of Melanie Nilles‘ Awakening since in 2018, though it had a different cover back then. I believe it is now a perma-freebie (or it just happens to be free right now), but I think I won a copy before it went free. (I have no real memory of any of that, but I have it marked as “won” on Goodreads. Thus all the “I believes” and “I thinks.” I’m not 100% certain.)

awakening melanie nilles

Lilly has been marked for death by daemons from a hidden world, a place known as the Shadow Realm. Within her has awakened the spirit of their enemy, one of the luriel. Such beings are myths to her, but one man is out to prove that they exist. The daemon slayer, Mychel, will introduce her to a world of shadows and light hiding beyond the comfort of science and technology, where ancient myths are real and an eternal war rages on, a war in which she has now been conscripted to fight.

One daemon is doing his best to destroy her before that happens. In human form, Darrac is able to get close to her and soon realizes that she is different—through Lilly, an ancient power has revived, a terrible power than can end the war…by eliminating both luriel and daemons. But destroying that power would mean sacrificing the one who has changed his heart.

Time is running out as the luriel within Lilly matures and her powers grow. One choice will determine the fate of two realms.

my review

Mawage.
Mawage is wot bwings us togeder tooday.
Mawage, that bwessed awangment,
that dweam wifin a dweam…
And wuv, tru wuv, will fowow you foweva…
So tweasure your wuv

Let me tell you a story of marriage. A week ago I noticed that I own several books essentially titled Awakening, seven of them were unread. So, I set myself a challenge to read them all. I even cleverly titled it the Awakening Challenge…OK, maybe not so cleverly. When I told my husband about it, he laughed and said, “You know you’ll DNF at least one of those, right?” I responded, “Well, I certainly won’t NOW!” Because I dislike not finishing books generally and I hate doing it during a challenge (it always leaves me feeling like I didn’t really complete it). But to DNF a book and prove my husband right? THE HORROR! There is no chance any book in my Awakening Challenge will go unfinished.

But then along came Melanie Nilles’ Awakening, the third Awakening book to be read in my challenge, and I could tell very early on that this book and I would not get along. I wanted to DNF it at about page 25 and again on every page after that. But I persisted, finally finishing it by the strength of my stubborn determination not to let the marital unit get a free “I told you so” out of the deal.

I think Nilles had an interesting kernel of an idea, but the emotional whiplash kills the book. The main character constantly goes back and forwards. “I saw a monster…no, no, that’s not possible.” “I miss Rian…no, don’t think of that.” “I feel safe with him…I can’t trust him.” On and on and on and on and on, back and forwards, back and forwards, back and forwards. The whole first third of the book is nothing but repeats of this cycle. All of it is worsened by the fact that Nilles apparently lacks the ability to write emotions subtly. It all just hits you in the face and Lilly comes off badly for it.

Then there are all the truly stupid decisions Lilly makes, prioritizing things that make no sense. And there is her desperation for a man, any man. It’s pitiful and uncomfortable and made me dislike her A LOT. Darrac (even outside of being a demon, which was super obvious and unbelievable that Lilly didn’t believe) was emotionally manipulative and a bad boyfriend. But still Lilly clung to him like he was more important than her own life (literally).

But worst of all, I think, is the way everything was so repetitive. The narrator would tell you something was possible, then the ‘good guys’ would say, “I’m afraid this is going to happen.” Then the villains would have a conversation saying, “This is my plan.” Then it would happen. I’m just grateful we didn’t have to also get an “Ah-ha, this is how I did it” or “I was afraid that would happen” recap too.

All in all, I feel like the book did improve as it went along. But by that time I was so put off by the whole thing that I just wanted to trash it and move on.

awakening nilles

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Book Review: Awakening, by Amanda M. Lee

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I picked up a freebie code for an Audible copy of Awakening (Covenant College, #1)
by Amanda M. Lee floating around the internet somewhere, probably from FreeAudiobookCodes. I listened to it as part of my March Awakening Challenge.

awakening Amanda M Lee

College was supposed to be all about booze and boys. For Zoe Lake, though, it’s all about monsters and mayhem.

An incoming freshman at Covenant College, Zoe is excited to meet her roommates and attend her classes. There’s only one problem: Covenant College isn’t all it’s purported to be.

First off, there are attractive — yet mysterious — men skulking around every corner. Then there’s that persistent professor that thinks he knows some secret about her past that even she isn’t aware exists.

Then there are the rumors. You know the ones. The ones that say Covenant College is home to more than just humans — but vampires and werewolves, too.

Not only is Zoe going to find herself in the middle of madness — but she’s going to have to try and pass finals while she endeavors to solve the mystery of what a monster really is.

my review

The writing and narrations were fine, but the main character is so unpleasant I couldn’t enjoy the book. I’m not one who thinks all heroines have to be polite and pleasant, but Zoe is like someone took a Mean Girl and centered a book around her. She’s not just rude and abrasive, she’s needlessly cruel, shallow, and narcissistic. She even says she’s a narcissist at one point and all I could think was, “Being self-aware doesn’t make it any more tolerable.”

She’s also cliched in a hundred ways. She’s ‘not like other girls,’ can fight well ‘because she hung out with more boys than girls growing up,’ effortlessly good at everything, sarcastic even in the face of death, pretty, wears Star Wars, Marvel t-shirts and Chucks. She’s a self-centered walking cliche.

I did appreciate that she is unabashedly and unapologeticaly sexual. But I could have done without the roommate constantly calling her a slut for it. (Just as I could have done without the virgin character simultaneously being bashed for being a virgin over and over again and being solely focused on ‘losing her v-card.’) It was an unpleasant.

Zoe does step up and save the day more than once. But honestly, every-time she did I rather thought it out of character for her. There’s a scene at a frat party where an inebriated girl is being ‘cut from the herd’ by two guys and Zoe feels uncomfortable about it, but decides not to intervene (given the rest of the plot, this girl was almost certainly later raped). That was a reaction that fit the Zoe Lee crafted far better than the times she steps in to help.

I’ll also note that the use of date rape drugs and the subsequent rapes are included as pretty cheap plot devices and dismissed almost jokingly in the big climactic finish. No one is caught or punished, nor is there any indication that it’s stopped. It is treated as unimportant to the ‘real’ plot. Leave that crap out then, IMO.

awakening amanda m lee

Awakening Challenge

Awakening: A New Mini Challenge

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awakening lineup

I haven’t done one in a while, but there have been several times over the years that I’ve noticed I have a bucket of books with the same title. Off the top of my head, I remember finding that I had five called Bound By Blood, seven that included the phrase Blood Moon, and four called Blood Lust…Geez, I don’t think I realized they’re all blood-related. And because I enjoy finding unexpected patterns and reveling in them, I set these titles aside as reading challenges and read them all together.

I even did the same thing for a character model once because I kept passing covers on my Goodreads shelves with the same face on them. I called it the Annoying Close-Up Guy Challenge.

‘Annoying close-up guy’ reading challenge wrap-up

I seem to remember not liking many of the books, but the challenge itself, all with essentially the same cover, was extra amusing.

Well, today, I’m setting a new reading challenge for myself. I recently read and reviewed Jennifer Leigh Pezzano’s Awakening. And while I was hunting it up on Goodreads to cross-post my review, I noticed that I have a lot of books with the word Awakening in the title.

Book Review: Awakening, by Jennifer Leigh Pezzano

Between titles and series names, I have 25 books that include the word Awakening. And that’s just Awakening, not awakened, or awakens, or just awake. Now, some of these books I’ve read, one of them is on the Did Not Finish shelf, and I’m not prepared to commit to 25 books. (Here they are for reference, though.)

books with awakening in the title

So, I’m going to whittle this challenge down to just titles that read Awakening and then stretch it a little to include the two called The Awakening (since they would be shelved as Awakening, The anyway.) That reduces us to 8 books, one of which is an audiobook and one I’ve already recently read and reviewed, but I’m counting since it’s what started this challenge in the first place. I actually feel really lucky that these are all either stand-alone or first books in series. How blessed is that?

So, that gives us (in alphabetical order by author’s last name):

 

The Awakening, by Kate Chopin
Awakening (Talentborn, #1) by C.S. Churton
Awakening (Triorion, #1), by L.J. Hachmeister
The Awakening (Guardian of Spirits, #1), by Kaylee Johnston
Awakening (Covenant College, #1), by Amanda M. Lee
Awakening (The Luriel Cycle, #1), by Melanie Nilles
Awakening (The Shard Cycle, #)1, by Ono Northey
Awakening, by Jennifer Leigh Pezzano

I’ll come back and link the reviews as I finish the books. I am not, however, going to force myself to read them back-to-back—which is what I usually do—because I already promised myself to spend March reading books from my physical bookshelves.

So, I’ll start with the audiobook (Amanda M. Lee’s Awakening) since I need to fold laundry anyway. Then, I’ll start hitting the rest of these between physical books. That way, I’m not breaking my March promise to myself completely…just bending it a bit when a new, shiny idea came along.

Am I the only one who does this? I know accidentally having multiple books with the same title can only really happen once your library gets past a certain point. I have literally thousands of ebooks, so it’s less surprising to see this sort of thing happen than it would be if I owned 200 books. But still, anyone else set little mini-challenges for themselves?

Edit: Here is a link to the wrap-up post. I ended up reading 12—instead of 8—books called Awakening during the actual challenge. Then, another three after the fact because it made me laugh to do so.