Pretty Souls

Review copy provided by the author

An entertaining story with a nice balance of paranormal activity and teenage reality.

Pretty Souls is the story of Ellery “Elle” Jameson and her foster sister Cassidy “Cass” Wegner a werewolf and half-vampire respectively, whom while on patrol one night discover the beginnings of something they have never come across before. The people of their town are slowly becoming what seems to be living zombies and it's up to the girls to figure out who (or what) is behind it before someone they care about becomes the next victim.

The task isn't easy though, it's not like the girls have a 1-800 number they can call for advice, its just two teenage girls, their limited experiences and wits. It also doesn't help that the girls have their own lives to deal with. Lives that include doing their best not to screw up the home they currently have with their great foster parents or to destroy the reputations they've built up for themselves at school.

The pace of the story I admit feels a little slow at times, Elle and Cass may have been patrolling the streets of their town and dealing with the occasional paranormal baddie for a while but their far from experts. They're pretty much making up their next moves as they go along and despite Cassidy's “sources” and the suspects on their list each move they make seems to lead to a dead end until a little over a hundred pages when they hit a break and things start to really pick up.

I enjoyed seeing the werewolf issues from a female perspective, I haven't come across it that much in the YA genre and it was nice to see the downs as well as the ups to being able to shift your form. Another thing I enjoyed about Pretty Souls was the relationship between Elle and Cass; even though they weren't related by blood I enjoyed the bond between the two. They really felt like sisters, not always getting along but always being there for each other when the other needed her most. I also enjoyed the fact that the parents were actually not absent in this story, the plot was able to carry on without having parental figures being dead or MIA for most of the story and lastly I enjoyed all the non-paranormal bits that balanced out the supernatural parts. The story wasn't just about finding and defeating the villain, Elle also had guy problems occupying her mind for a large part of the time, as well as slight insecurities with her looks. She also thought about her foster parents and how she was lucky to find them and how she didn't want to lose them.

Two things I didn't really enjoy about the story was that one, I would have liked to have gotten a little more insight into the girls motivation behind their nightly patrols in the first place. And two, the story leaves you with a cliffhanger and some loose ends. I don't know if it was good or bad that I could see it coming, there were clues set out through the end of the story and the final page lets you know that this book really was just the beginning to something bigger. This story was worth the cliffie though and I can't wait for the next one to come out.