Title: Shadow Embraced
Author: Cheree Smith
Publisher: Dark World Books
Rating: WARTY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley.
I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review. Since this is a new novel, this review is shorter so as not to rob the writer of her story, but even so, it will probably still be more detailed than you'll typically find elsewhere!
It feels a bit weird to be reading two novels side-by-side, one with a character called Cinder, the other with a character called Scarlett! Scarlett is evidently a vampire but of course she doesn’t know it. She liked to hang with her friend Alex who was always bringing trouble on her, and Scarlett was too stupid to figure this out. She goes to a fight club where she encounters a weird woman. There's a police raid, but fortunately her dad is a cop so she gets away unscathed, but falls once more afoul of her parents.
She lives in a red brick townhouse which turns into apartment. Maybe her adoptive mom is a witch?! Scarlett has a bad dream, and wakes up to discover that she was sleep-walking again. This time, she wrote 'no escape' on all the posters in her room. Her mom bans her from hanging with Alex so the first thing this idiot does is hang with Alex. I already don’t like the fem protag at all. Worse than just hanging together, they ditch school under the juvenile delusion that Scarlett's parents won't find out, and the first thing that happens at the arcade is that they run into a guy with hair falling into his eyes. Seriously? SERIOUSLY? I'm only ten pages in and I want to call in sick. Instant male trope. Just add vomit and shake. Fortunately we don't have to deal with him any more. Unfortunately, there are more waiting in the wings.
Smith needs a good editor. She has problems discerning 'its' from 'it's', and there are some really awkwardly constructed sentences, such as "One sound takes precedent over everything else"? Precedent? I think she means precedence. Either that or "One sound is precedent over everything else." Scarlett has heightened senses. It’s weird I should be reading this in parallel with Under the Never Sky where there are heightened sense traits, too. But Scarlett has bigger problems. After she beats the male trope at an arcade game, she starts in on one of her 'spells', and not of the witchy kind: dizziness, odd feelings, blurred vision. Next she launches herself at Alex and bites her neck! Suddenly, the woman from the fight club is there trying to help her recover, and she feels a needle and passes out. How that woman got Scarlett away from her assault on Alex by shooting her up with a drug in public is not dealt with.
When Scarlett recovers consciousness, she's in a cabin out in the woods in the middle of nowhere. Another woman is there - a doctor or a nurse - and she takes a blood sample and talks like there's something wrong, something unusual, something way out of the ordinary. I hope so, otherwise why write this novel?! Hopefully there'll be some information coming soon about what's going on here, but of course its doled out like it’s the last information on Earth and if we don’t make it last as long as we can, it will be all gone and then what on Earth shall we all do?
When the woman takes a phone call, Scarlett bolts out the door and starts running through the woods. She encounters something there which is somewhere between a man and a wolf, but it has quills (not hairs) on its pelt, so who knows what it is? If I’d known this was a werewolf story I definitely wouldn’t have selected it! Fortunately it’s not only werewolf. Full disclosure: I find werewolf stories to be the most laughable of all paranormal tales, coming even lower down than vampires and fairies. However, I will try to get through this one.
Scarlett runs until she comes across a decaying town. Somehow the wolf thing doesn’t get her but she's apparently too dumb to grasp that it actually isn't trying to "get" her. A woman's voice says, "Welcome to Haven" and she passes out again only to find herself awakening in the cabin once more. This is becoming a bit tedious. Now there are two women, the nurse-doc and kidnap woman bitching about what’s going on with Scarlett and still telling her nothing. I have to wonder about Scarlett's IQ. Right after one of women tells the other that "He wants her alive", obviously referring to Scarlett, Scarlett is telling herself "I'm going to die"! She definitely seems to be a were short of a wolf - or maybe a vamp short of a pyre. She feels like she's burning up so she staggers to the nearby bathtub and falls in. She keeps hearing a voice chanting 'No escape', and she passes out again. Seriously?
By the end of chapter four the only thing we’ve learned is that Scarlett is an adoptee, and her real father was a vampire. I'm guessing that her real mother was a werewolf or a non-paranormal. She's carted off to reform school for paranormals where she gets the usual trope of either a really cool roommate or a really obnoxious one. This time it’s the obnoxious option. Apparently there's no in between in YA world. She wanders the grounds and meets a male protagonist immediately. He's a skateboarder with hair in his eyes. Excuse me, I have to run and vomit. Oookay, that's better. Paul shows her around the place, but she's not yet done with trope YA hottie guys. Next she meets Daemon (no, I am not kidding, that's his name!) and it’s instadore (rising orchestral music)! Excuse me, I have to vomit again. Oookay, that's better.
Next she's subject to appalling cruelty and bullying from her teacher, named Talon. No, I'm not kidding. Seriously? Do I have to endure 234 pages of this? She gets into a fight with a girl called Jynx, and her punishment for this (apparently she's to blame even though Jynx started it) is to get into a fight with one of the school's council members, named Rome(!), where she gets her ass kicked. Then she passes out again. I've read to some bad YA, but never one where the fem protag is so given to attacks of the wilts and the vapors. Swoon me to the max!
Despite the full schedule Scarlett tells us she has (this is first person present narration), she seems to be able to find all the time in the world to do whatever she wants whenever she wants. On this occasion it's to follow Daemon through underground tunnels to the decayed village where he's supposed to train her to be so good that she’ll take the cruel wind out of Talon's abusive sails. Apparently her first lesson was to follow him through the dark tunnels, at which she succeeded. Her next lesson is to be able to focus and avoid her enemies. What enemies? Daemon doesn’t explain who they might be or why they would have any. I guess she's supposed to take that on faith. But it gives them a chance to get physically close to one another. We learn of a rumor that the village is haunted by a vampire intent upon exacting revenge for the fact that vampires "cleansed" the village for no other reason than that they could then use it as a training ground. Scarlett isn’t even remotely phased by this disturbing admission of wanton mass murder of men, women, and children for no reason other than vampire convenience. Now I know I detest her.
Next she finds that someone has been into her room and left her a message on the computer - a computer which is showing in-circuit TV of live fights down in the tunnels beneath the school. The message warns her that people are out to get her. So what's new?! This had the potential to be a really good story, and maybe it is for someone at the lower end of the YA age range, but this level of writing isn't for me. I feel bad about that because both the cover and the blurb made me want to read it, and even now I would like the like it, but it's becoming ever harder to do so. I was hoping, based on the cover and blurb, for a good YA vampire story, if there be such a beast, but that's not happened. What I neither expected, nor wanted was a YA fight-club novel. And yes, I know it mentioned this in the blurb on Netgalley, but I didn't expect it to be nothing but brutal fight after brutal fight! There's nothing remotely remotely entertaining to me about that.
If there had been anything else going on, that would have made a bit of a difference, but all this novel is, is one bloody fight after another. That's neither entertaining nor even interesting to me, not at all, and after yet another pointless assault on Scarlett in chapter twelve, I decided I could not stand to read any more of this story.
