Enlightened is a romantic fantasy for YA and is the first in
a series.
Harmony is one of the souls in Artopia that is sent to Earth
for their life lessons. She has a guide who takes care of her and is able to
hear her thoughts and try to steer her through the process of education in life
lessons. As the souls reach the end of the lesson, they are pulled back to Artopia
where there is a full unpacking and sharing of learning. Harmony realises that
if she concentrates hard enough on Earth, she has some memory of where she is
from so is able to look for her classmates and possibly draw them together
before they get pulled back. Her feelings for her classmate Kaleb, however,
seem to run deeper than just a little liking. He has confessed his love to her
and she is confused. Her last life on Earth, where she lost her boyfriend, was
torture, and she nearly died of a broken heart. How is this linked to Kaleb and
her feelings on Earth and Artopia for him? Surely it should not be this
intense?
The blurb that was offered told of a number of lives that
ended accidentally but all belonged to one person, which intrigued me. As I
began the book, the author states in her dedication that she will see her
father after school. In hindsight I understand it, but in the beginning, it
made me think that the author was a young girl/teenager and the style of the
first couple of pages reinforced this. I was shocked when I realised she was an
adult as the writing is very fluffy and on a very high emotional level with
lots of exclamation points strewn all over. I hate bashing peoples’ works, but
I think that’s the beauty of being a reviewer – there is something for
everyone, and this was just not for me.
You have a soul who has life lessons on Earth. So many
questions. Right then, does that mean that all people on Earth are souls? If so,
why bother to go at all? If not, why Earth? When do the lessons end? Why do
they not occur in Earth’s timeline sequence? What happens if their lessons
cause a butterfly effect? What happens to the people on Earth once an
accidental death has taken place? How do they recover? The barrier between
worlds prevents them from remembering who they are, but this would mean that
they would not be able to incorporate it into the next mission to Earth as they
would not remember it from Artopia. It would also mean that what was about to
happen on Earth must have been preknown by the guides or they are just sent
there randomly? What if they learn the same lesson over and over? The whole
concept of the story didn’t make sense once you looked deeper into it, and to
get to the concept took a long time. The beginning of the story was very
confusing and I nearly put it aside quite a few times, but felt I owed the
author a full review so slogged on.
Once Harmony realises that she and Kaleb are meant to be
soul mates the style of writing becomes OTT. Over the space of a few pages she
mentions running her hands through his silky sandy-blonde hair a fair number of
times and he touches her long brown curls over and over again. The repetition
was beginning to drive me nuts. Also his honey-scent and her floral scent and them
breathing it in and going “ahhh” gets repeated over and over. Now I’m all for a
good YA love story, but when the characters are teenagers and the story has
them tied into soul mates and they feel that their love is so intense that they
cannot live without each other and feel empty enough to kill themselves, then
warning bells start ringing. To advocate that a person’s validation only comes
from the love of another is a dangerous message to send out. In fact Edward and
Bella from Twilight spring to mind.
It’s unfortunate that so many negatives stuck in my mind with
this book instead of the positives that I’m sure were there. Well done to the
author for taking on the idea, but the book just did not resonate with me and
the (obvious) cliffhanger that ended it, reinforced the fact that I would not
read the next in the series. I really hope there are others out there that will
connect on a better level with the book than I did. On the plus side, the
grammar and spelling were well taken care of.
Thank you to Voracious Readers Only and the author for the
opportunity to review the book.
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