Emily May's Reviews > Arcadia Awakens

This book managed to tick all of the boxes for the first few chapters (actually quite a few chapters because they're only short) and I was pleasantly surprised to find a young adult author that: a) doesn't think it's okay to be condescending when the audience is younger, and b) creates an atypical heroine who isn't all about drooling after her inevitable one true love. As a matter of fact, the author attempts to write quite prettily and sets the scene in the Sicilian countryside very well, you can practically hear the waves of the Mediterranean sloshing against the shore.

The protagonist - Rosa - immediately stands out against countless other young adult urban fantasy heroines. She's introduced as something of a kleptomaniac, she's snarky and upon meeting the novel's obvious love interest, rather than seeing cupids flying and hearing someone playing a violin, she turns away with a good dose of sarcasm as a goodbye present. It's no secret that they will clearly meet again and gradually Rosa's attitude towards him will change, but I was thankful for the lack of insta-love and sappy heroines.

So, I had the protagonist I've always longed for, the setting out of my wildest dreams... what was the problem? The lack of story. Or, at least, the lack of an engaging story. I kept reading and waiting for the moment when the author would use her heroine and her setting to create a novel that would blow my mind but it just never delivered. The big mystery of the book was easy to guess, even the author realised this and revealed it all pretty early on... but after that the story consisted of a lot of info-dumping about Greek mythology and the Italian mafia and the legendary island of Arcadia. I felt that the author set the kind of scene that had me anticipating something awesome but it was highly anticlimatic in the end.

I do wonder if this was done intentionally, because this book is the start of a trilogy and perhaps the author wanted to place emphasis on the setting and characters in book one so that you would actually care about them when the real story gets going in book two. It's possible but it isn't enough, if you're writing the first book in a series it's so important to make sure the readers are going to want to continue. I finished this book feeling like I had nothing to look forward to in the sequels.

Many thanks to the publisher for kindly providing an arc of this for review