Series: Annar
Author: Heather Lyons
Length: 6665 Kindle units
Rating: 4 stars
The Plot
Chloe is not sure she wants her fate. From her birth, she has been destined to be a Creator and a leader of the Magicals on the seven planes. This makes her unique, but it also makes her a target for the Magicals’ enemies. One day Jonah shows up at her school, and she instantly knows him – She has been having dreams about him her entire life. And she’s about to find out that Jonah and his twin brother Kellan have more to do with her destiny than she ever imagined.
The Good
So I got the review request for this book, and it was like “Girl with supernatural powers has dreams about a cute boy she discovers is real. And he has a twin.” This is, like, my book kryptonite. I cannot turn it away. My friend says that if The Ring featured a YA novel instead of a video, this would be the plot, as that would be the best way to maximize readership. I realize this trope has been done lots of time, but, really, the only thing that could make me want to read it more is if the twin were evil. But not really evil. Just misunderstood.
A Matter of Fate did not disappoint, and it actually managed to be a better book than the cliché format implied. Chloe lives in an interesting magical world full of people with all kinds of different powers. Chloe herself is brave and caring. Her parents are not as supportive as she would like them to be, but she forges a family out of the people around her. She is a strong, albeit overemotional, girl who is doing her best to live up to the future that has been mapped out for her.
The Bad
I find I don’t have too much to say that’s bad about this book. It was on the long side and dragged a bit in parts, but that wasn’t that big a deal. So why, you may ask, have I detracted a star from the total. Well, that was mostly to do with
The Romance
A Matter of Fate was definitely a book that was heavier on the romance than the plot. I mean, the last plot-relevant thing happened with still a quarter of the book left to go. That’s not a bad thing, though. My bigger sort of issue was that on some levels this book was about how much love sucks, and the overarching feeling I had coming out of it was one of sadness.
One of the themes of the book was that you can’t fight your fate. At the beginning of the book, I expected the story to be about a girl trying to choose between her destiny and her desires. But really it was about her realization that accepting the fate that everyone had planned for her was for the best. Chloe has known Jonah in her dreams for her entire life, but because of what seems to be chance, she talks to his twin Kellan first and starts to date him. But she and Jonah have what is called a Connection, which means they are destined to be together. And thus a love triangle of no good outcome is born.
Will I read more?
I’m not sure where the next book in the series is going to go. There are a lot of potential directions. I could even see the book being about one of Chloe’s friends rather than Chloe. I think that might make me more willing to read it. It’s not that A Matter of Fate was bad. It’s that I can’t watch Chloe emotionally abuse poor Kellan anymore. I know she doesn’t mean to be cruel, and he lets her do it. But. It was just so sad.
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