Embrace

Embrace
By Jessica Shirvington
Sourcebooks Fire, 2012. 374 pgs. Young Adult

Violet Eden has long loved her friend Lincoln, but he sees her as a training partner for martial arts and running. Just as Violet is about to see if they can take things to the next level, he betrays her. Lincoln has known all along that Violet, on her seventeenth birthday, will find out that she, like him, is a Grigori, a half-angel, half-human charged with protecting humans from fallen angels. Violet just wants to have a normal life and she's not so sure she wants to embrace this new life--and she is sure that she no longer wants nothing to do with Lincoln. She starts spending a lot of time with Phoenix, a fallen angel, who, technically she should want nothing to do with but who draws her in so much that she can't stay away. However, even as romance is developing with Phoenix, she can't forget Lincoln--and she also can't quite walk away from the fact that the Grigori need her help as fallen angels are wreaking havoc on her town.

I think teen readers will love this one--it's got passion, it's got a love triangle, it's got all that paranormal goodness (for those who like that sort of thing). As an adult reader, I struggle a bit with the relationship between Violet and Phoenix, who is portrayed as that sexy bad boy but who crosses the line into a little too bad (and I didn't quite feel like Violet understood that enough). Teens will clamor for the next book in the series, and hopefully they'll be a little more appalled by Phoenix than Violet was.

AE