Angel Burn (Early Review)

Angel Burn by L.A. Weatherly

Angel Trilogy #1

Willow knows she’s different from other girls, and not just because she loves tinkering with cars. Willow has a gift. She can look into the future and know people’s dreams and hopes, their sorrows and regrets, just by touching them. She has no idea where this power comes from. But the assassin, Alex, does. Gorgeous, mysterious Alex knows more about Willow than Willow herself does. He knows that her powers link to dark and dangerous forces, and that he's one of the few humans left who can fight them. When Alex finds himself falling in love with his sworn enemy, he discovers that nothing is as it seems, least of all good and evil. In the first book in an action-packed romantic trilogy, L. A. Weatherly sends readers on a thrill ride of a road trip — and depicts the human race at the brink of a future as catastrophic as it is deceptively beautiful.

Willow has always been an outcast due to her eccentric tastes and her psychic gifts. She just never knew why she had that gift or that it came from dark beings. Alex has hunted the Angels all his life, and his is the best at what he does. When he is sent to eliminate Willow, he almost does just that before he realizes that she is something special. Despite knowing he shouldn't, he winds up falling for her, despite her heritage. In the process they both learn truths about themselves that they never thought possible as they wind up on the run from the entire world.

The characters are what really drive this book. Even the bad guy's characters add to the book as they really make your skin crawl, making for a very believable danger. The main character, Willow despite her differences and how people treat her, still has always wanted to help others. She's had a rough life, but she's never let that stop her or hold her back. This is why it was so hard for her to accept the knowledge of her heritage as it was so horrifying to believe she had such "evil" in her. What Alex realized that she didn't was that just because she may be half angel, doesn't mean she is evil at all. In fact she proves to be very selfless and caring, everything a full angel is. Speaking of Alex, he is a very tortured character. He didn't have a real childhood, and spend practically his entire life hunting down the angels. He's lost almost more than he can bear, and that has really hardened him. Yet, even he couldn't resist all that Willow is and quickly found himself falling.

I've read books where angels are good, and some where they definitely were not the celestial beings we think of them to be. However, the angels in this book were completely unique to me in the fact that they seemed to be downright evil. If you take a vampire's need to feed off others as well as their enthrallment and combine it with some of the nastier parts you can expect from the fae, that's what the angels are like in this series. Pretty horrific huh? The future that is inevitable unless Willow can somehow stop them is one that will involve the complete and utter enslavement of the human race, with none the wiser. To think that the people would actually be happy while this is happening is absolutely sickening and only makes you root for Willow and Alex to succeed even more.

Angel Burn is an utterly enthralling read. I was hooked from the start, but the more I read, the more engrossed in the story and the characters I got. This book was told in rotating perspectives, with Willow's being in first person, and the rest in third. At times, the shifts from first to third did get a little confusing and that is the only reason I'm giving this a less than perfect rating. I just wish the transition would have been a little smoother so it wasn't so jarring and I didn't have to take a moment to figure out who was talking. Otherwise, this really was a fantastic read, and I am very eager to read the next book to see what happens. I'm a little nervous at how things will play out based on the ending of Angel Burn, but I guess only time will tell. Make sure you check this book out as it is truly one you won't want to miss in the paranormal YA genre.

(Received from Netgalley)

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