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Airel: The Awakening by Aaron Patterson, Chris White
4.0

This is an intense book! In a good way. A lot is going on, and there is a lot to catch your interest. First there is Airel and you have no idea what is happening to her for most of the book. Then there is a killer, possibly two, a stalker, a guy, and a whole lotta mystery. Mix in a secondary story that goes back thousands of years and you have one heck of a book.

One of the first things I noticed about this book is that it's a good bit longer than most of the books I have been reading lately. It's about 425 pages, and most of the books I have been reading in the past few months have been right around the 300 page mark or shorter. So it was nice to mix in a longer book. You can really get a lot more detail in those extra 100 pages. And a lot of unanswered questions. I both loved, and hated the amount of unanswered questions in this book. The mystery surrounding Airel was awesome and I loved reading along, trying to find out what was going on, but so much was left up in the air for so long that I started to get frustrated at how little had been revealed to the readers, even up to the half way point of the book. After you get about half way done, you start to get some answers but 220 pages is a long time to wait.

I loved Airel. I thought she was the cutest little thing. She is smart and strong and you just can't help but root for her. I liked Michael too, even though I felt like their romance was a bit cheesy at parts. It wasn't exactly insta love, but it was not too far off. Still, there is just something about the two of them that I responded positively to.

I will admit that there were a few points in the book where I was confused. There are multiple new "guys" introduced and a few times I got them mixed up. Once I got the hang of how the story was shifting back and forth between the different people and places and fell into a better reading pattern and really started enjoying the story. The story of Airel is really great, and a worth while read. I thought they focused a little too much on the past, but maybe that is just because I don't love long battle scenes. The story is well written and very well developed, and other than a few confusing moments I really really liked it! I can't wait to see what is going to happen next in book 2, Michael. The ending of this book certainly shocked me, so I am really interested to see were we go from here.