Book: Paranormalcy Author: Kiersten White
Series: Paranormalcy
Publication Date: August 31st, 2010
Publisher: HarperTeen
Rating: 3 Stars
Evie's always thought of herself as a normal teenager, even though she works for the International Paranormal Containment Agency, her ex-boyfriend is a faerie, she's falling for a shape-shifter, and she's the only person who can see through paranormals' glamours.Don't you love it when true love triumphs between two inexperienced teenagers who happen to save the day because of their great capacity for emotion? It's so precious. It makes me weep.
But Evie's about to realize that she may very well be at the center of a dark faerie prophecy promising destruction to all paranormal creatures.
So much for normal.
Don't get me wrong; Paranormalcy isn't that bad. In fact, it can be even argued that it is one of the saving graces of the genre. The problem is that it just isn't anything new. Sure, I laughed, and I felt a little bit when characters died. But my general feelings are ambivalent. And when you read a book, is your only expectation that it not be gruesomely terrible, or even not bad? Especially after reading something like Days of Blood & Starlight, I needed something light, and this book did that for me. But I couldn't find any of the sort of depth and humanity that I did in Karou and her friends.
It was just so... meh. I can think of more thinks I didn't like about it than what I did like. For example, I didn't like the main character, Evie. Maybe it's a product of growing up, but I thought she didn't act her age. I can understand that she's been isolated from society, but does that really mean she has to go around calling everything cute and obsessing over pink things? There is this one part I remember where she said, "I even got a cute last name, Green." And the freaking out over lockers and high school things? It was cute (oh God, I sound like her now) in the beginning, but then it just became redundant. I got the fact that she was inexperienced. Also, Easton Heights sounds really dull. I prefer Gossip Girl.
The plot was... nice, I guess. It wasn't really anything new. Reth really interests me, though. He's so cruel yet attractive. Wow, I'm as bad as those Mary Sues. But Lend was too boring for me, especially compared with someone like Reth. If you're going to make one of your love interests a faery, you'd better match up. Lend is interesting, but in the end, if we deconstruct him, he's a teenage boy who reacts to things quite boringly. There wasn't even much wittiness tossed in there. He's supposed to provide a dose of normal, but I didn't quite like the normal that I got. Everything was mostly predictable, although I didn't expect what happened to Lisha.
I've been ragging on the book enough, though. I'm not giving it 3 stars for no reason; I did like some of the things that happened. Although the dialogue wasn't very witty, the way the book was written was very light-hearted, despite all the intense stuff happening. In that way, the normalcy helped ground it. I liked reading about Evie's interaction with the paranormal creatures that she bags and tags; there just wasn't enough of that. As far as supernatural YA goes, this is pretty decent.
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