Torment by Lauren Kate
Published: September 2010
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Available: Amazon
Blurb:
Hell on earth.
That’s what it’s like for Luce to be apart from her fallen angel boyfriend, Daniel.
It took them an eternity to find one another, but now he has told her he must go away. Just long enough to hunt down the Outcasts—immortals who want to kill Luce. Daniel hides Luce at Shoreline, a school on the rocky California coast with unusually gifted students: Nephilim, the offspring of fallen angels and humans.
At Shoreline, Luce learns what the Shadows are, and how she can use them as windows to her previous lives. Yet the more Luce learns, the more she suspects that Daniel hasn’t told her everything. He’s hiding something—something dangerous.
What if Daniel’s version of the past isn’t actually true? What if Luce is really meant to be with someone else?
That’s what it’s like for Luce to be apart from her fallen angel boyfriend, Daniel.
It took them an eternity to find one another, but now he has told her he must go away. Just long enough to hunt down the Outcasts—immortals who want to kill Luce. Daniel hides Luce at Shoreline, a school on the rocky California coast with unusually gifted students: Nephilim, the offspring of fallen angels and humans.
At Shoreline, Luce learns what the Shadows are, and how she can use them as windows to her previous lives. Yet the more Luce learns, the more she suspects that Daniel hasn’t told her everything. He’s hiding something—something dangerous.
What if Daniel’s version of the past isn’t actually true? What if Luce is really meant to be with someone else?
Review:
So, in my endless annoyance with misleading covers I find that I continue to not understand the reluctance of cover artists to READ the book they are designing a cover for! Or with the publishing houses to let author's say "Hey, this isn't right". I love the Torment cover. It is absolutely beautiful. But that's not Luce!! how can they continue to get this wrong, when her hair is such a big thing in the book? This is the second time, and since I've seen the cover of Passion the third book in the series I know they don't even fix it there!! Maybe I'm obsessing a bit, but it just drives me nuts.
Anyways, despite the cover I did really enjoy this book. I actually thought I'd already reviewed this one, since I read all three already released books in the series late last summer.
Torment changes the scenery and adds in many new characters, but still retains the same eerie, dark feeling of Fallen. Luce and Daniel have been separated and she is falling prey to not just one but two not so good guys. But Kate does a really good job of blurring that line between good and evil, how each side sees their side as the good side. With Daniel in the middle of the tug-of-war between the two sides, it's even harder to figure out which side he should choose, because neither actually seems all that good.
I was disappointed a bit with the separation of Luce and Daniel. It started to feel like the Twilight pattern (Book 1 - resist love, Book 2 - he leaves for her own good, Book 3 - resigned to being to together because they can't resist, Book 4 - loves other problems and maybe one will die) Maybe Kate won't fall completely into this repetitive mess.
The Announcers (or shadows as Luce called them before) were a really interesting development. Luce's experimentation with them changed things up, and I liked the out come of her learning to use them. Kate also did a great job in explaining how the Announcers work, or at least how Luce is figuring out how they work.
The ending was surprising, but I hate giant cliff-hangers. They tend to be big let downs that are dragged out for far too long in the next book. I wish Luce had actually done something that made an immediate difference to the war going on between Angels and Demons, or even to her relationship with Daniel.
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