The Heart of Worlds (The Other Worlds #1)
Lorena Beaver
Genre: YA fiction, fantasty, fiction
Spoiler Alert!
Synopsis:
Abigail was just a normal teenager trying to make it through high school... until she begins to hear voices in her head. The whispers quickly escalate and she begins to wonder if it's all supposed to mean something bigger than herself.
Through all the chaos, Abigail meets a new boy at school, Chase. From him, she learns that Earth is stuck between the war of two very powerful forces. Little does she know, they are fighting over her.
About the Author:
Lorena Beaver was born and raised in Nova Scotia. She published her first book, The Heart of Worlds, at the age of 22. She is currently studying at NSCC.
My Review (Spoiler Alert):
I want to start off by saying, congrats, Lorena! I always knew you would publish, and look at you now; TWO published!
The Heart of Worlds was not what I was expecting. Judging from the cover (something I try not to do, but end up doing regardless) my first thoughts were that this novel was going to be very religiously oriented. There were definitely some religious undertones, especially nearing the end of the novel, but not to the extent I had expected.
I really enjoyed the magic-esque side of the story; although I found the names of the power/those who wield the powers, a little too straight-forward, which ended up disrupting the sentences in a few places (just because of how the names sounded in the sentences, if that makes sense). Having multiple different subsets of abilities that different characters have, always makes for interesting character and story development.
I look forward to the development of Abigail's character and the discovery of all the powers that she possesses; I love her strong, female lead and sarcasm. I would also like to see the connection between Abigail and Chase described in more depth. I have a feeling that this is going to come up more in the second instalment, as I feel it is important to their relationship and also for the war between the two worlds.
Lorena's description of Ether and the landscape was very good, and I found myself picturing the castle and grounds as I was reading. For some reason I ended up picturing a castle similar to that of the Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz, and the yellow brick road leading up to the gates (with some minor alterations, of course).
That being said, this novel was much shorter than something I usually read. I typically try to avoid shorter novels, because I often find the descriptive writing that I so enjoy is lacking, and I'm left wanting more; as was the case for The Heart of Worlds. When something was described it was done very well, I just found that not enough description was there in general, and sometimes too much dialogue between characters (with no description of anything in between), which left me struggling to keep up with who was talking at times. There were also times that I lost track of where the characters were, because there were no landmarks being described to help me orient myself to landscape. An example of this was after Abigail was thrown from the window, Chase had finished healing her and she was going back inside the tower to get Zander. The story, in Abigail's POV, jumped from being outside, to up in the tower, to outside again, and I got a little lost.
Overall, I really enjoyed reading The Heart of Worlds, and look forward to reading the next instalment(s), and more to come from Ms. Beaver.
Congratulations, girlie!