Review ~ Angelbound ~ Christina Bauer

Title: Angelbound

Author: Christina Bauer

Published: December 17th 2013

By: Ink Monster LLC

Source: A free galley of this book was supplied by netgalley

Synopsis: Eighteen year old Myla Lewis is a girl who loves two things: kicking ass and kicking ass. She’s not your every day quasi-demon, half-demon and half-human, girl. For the past five years, Myla has lived for the days she gets to fight in Purgatory’s arena. When souls want a trial by combat for their right to enter heaven or hell, they go up against her, and she hasn’t lost a battle yet. 

But as she starts her senior year at Purgatory High, the arena fights aren’t enough to keep her spirits up anymore. When the demons start to act weird, even for demons, and the King of the Demons, Armageddon, shows up at Myla’s school, she knows that things are changing and it’s not looking good for the quasi-demons. Myla starts to question everything, and doesn’t like the answers she finds. What happened seventeen years ago that turned the quasi-demons into slave labor? Why was her mom always so sad? And why won’t anyone tell her who her father is? Things heat up when Myla meets Lincoln, the High Prince of the Thrax, a super sexy half-human and half-angel demon hunter. But what’s a quasi-demon girl to do when she falls for a demon hunter? It’s a good thing that Myla’s not afraid of breaking a few rules. With a love worth fighting for, Myla’s going to shake up Purgatory.

This was a hard one for me. I'm sorry to say that I did not finish this book.  That's not to say that the book was bad, far from it, hence my difficulty in writing this review.  The idea behind the story was good, the plot was progressing well, albeit slowly and there was a fair bit of action with a variety of battle scenes going on but for some reason there was nothing calling me to pick up the book and read it.

I've spent a good while thinking about the reasons why and I think the long and short of it was that I just didn't care about the characters.  As much as there was a lot going on and we were heading somewhere I still didn't feel as though I knew enough about the main protagonists to make me care about them and what information was provided became repetitive after a while.  There was a lot of questions to be answered and very little being revealed, or at least it felt that way to me. I wanted to learn more as the plot progressed and that didn't seem to happen. There are a lot of books out at the moment that really are all about the feels. They make you laugh, cry, seethe, whatever the emotion, but as well as that they give you insight into the personalities on the page.  It's their motive or their reaction to something or someone or their behaviour that triggers an emotion in the reader. You get to understand what drives them to behave in the way that they do.  I get that the main character here doesn't have all the facts but even then aside from the physical mechanics of the situations she faces I felt as though I got very little of anything else from her.

As I say, perhaps it's because I've read so many angsty books that I now expect the feels as part of the plot.  That may well be the case and it may also be the case that other readers will prefer this book simply because it doesn't have all the angst.   I get the feeling that if I had been drawn further into the book there would have been characters that I would have warmed to, Walker in particular but for the most part I found I was pretty uninterested.

I've given this a DNF but I don't want it to be seen as a totally negative thing.  It's absolutely not.  Different books call to different people.  Unfortunately this one didn't call to me.

DNF - Don't take my word for it.  Try it, you may enjoy it.