Aprilynne Pike has been spinning faerie stories since she was a child with a hyper-active imagination. At the age of twenty she received her BA in Creative Writing from Lewis-Clark State College in Lewiston, Idaho. When not writing, Aprilynne can usually be found at the gym; she also enjoys singing, acting, reading, and working with pregnant moms as a childbirth educator and doula. Aprilynne currently lives with her husband and three kids in Utah, and dreams of warmer climates.
My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars
Charlotte has always seen things and when she makes a decision at the age of six, to save her aunt’s life; her parents are the ones that suffer. Her mother is paralyzed and her father is dead. Ever since that day, Charlotte’s aunt Sierra has lived with them and also shares Charlotte’s secret. They both happen to be Oracles and no one can know what they can do.
Charlotte’s visions come and go and her aunt Sierra has trained her to fight them. Charlotte knows better than anyone the consequences of changing the things she sees but soon finds that she doesn’t have as much control over the visions as she thought. While at school one day, she is pulled into a vision she stop and sees one of her classmates has been murdered. Thinking she has some time to figure out what to do, Charlotte does nothing. Unfortunately, the next day, she realizes it is now too late as the vision came true and she starts to feel guilty for not acting. This vision is followed up shortly with more.
When Charlotte goes to her aunt, she realizes she won’t get any answers from her. Although Sierra has been training her to resist/fight the visions, she hasn’t been completely forthcoming with information and details about what being an oracle really means for Charlotte and she continues to tell her she won’t share anything until Charlotte turns 18. This is the catalyst to Charlotte looking at other ways to both learn more about being an Oracle as well as figuring out what to do with these visions.
After the second vision and death, Charlotte receives a mysterious text message that essentially calls her out for not helping the students that died. Of course she feels guilty but she is a bit concerned about the message. With nowhere else to turn, she replies back to the message to try to figure out who knows her secret as well as how they can help her.
“Smith” is someone who happens to have a link to an Oracle and that is where he learned everything he knows. He clearly has secrets and although Charlotte feels like he is helping her, he is also putting her in a bad position. Although it wasn’t completely obvious what his full story was, he had a plan and was going to use Charlotte to get what he wanted.
There is a little bit of a romance tied to this story but it didn’t take over the rest of the story. Linden is the love interest for Charlotte and where she is somewhat unknown at school, he is considered popular and they don’t hang out but he is always nice and talks to her. When Bethany, the first victim, dies, Linden takes it hard as they were close. As he tells Charlotte, he just wants to not have to talk about it anymore and by becoming closer to Charlotte, he finds he doesn’t have to.
So quite a bit gets revealed toward the end of this book and I’m not going to tell you any of it as I don’t want to ruin the mystery of what is really going on here. I though Pike did a great job of tying the story together and linking the stories of these characters together. This was a quick read that includes quite a bit of mystery alongside the paranormal aspect. If you like any of those things, definitely check this one out when you can.
Thank you to the Publisher and Edelweiss for the review copy.
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