The Dark Divine

Yup I'm fully into the YA now, and have finished another relative-newbie to the scene, The Dark Divine by Bree Despain - reviewed heavily already by other blogs, not to mention professional reviewers.  So why am I bothering?  Because I need to know what the fuss is about!  And I will spoil my own review right here and tell you that if you are looking for an original take on paranormal romance/YA, you might look elsewhere.

Grace Divine, as evidenced by her name, is a do-gooder.  In fact, her entire family are do-gooders, father being pastor at their local church, her brother a saint in hottie's clothing, sister named Charity and baby brother who I'm sure would be godly if he could talk.  But Grace's family has a dark past that came about through her brother Jude and some ordeal in the woods with their foster-type, troubled brother Daniel.  When Daniel and Jude went into the woods that day, only Jude returned home, covered in blood, with no answers - only hatred for his former friend who mysteriously disappears thereafter.  From this Grace tries to reconstruct what went wrong that fateful, mysterious day with Daniel and with Jude - and the answers may be way more than she can handle.

This wasn't anything new for me, as far as supernatural YA goes.  I did like the relationships Grace has with her brother and with her best friend, but both were pretty incidental to the story.  The Daniel character seemed to me more like an Edward Cullen than I'm comfortable with - kind of tired of the brooding, dark and whiny woe-is-me type of guy, not that I appreciated that before The Dark Divine.  Point is, Ms. Despain got a few too many cues from Twilight, including the oh-so-dark-and-mysterious love interest which I also just saw in Lauren Kate's Fallen and was already bored with.  The supernatural beings (won't give it away just now) are never really explained in detail, so there wasn't much excitement there.  And I'm the type to read into the different mythologies presented in the different books/series so again, nothing new here.

Sorry for the bad news, folks, hope to read something I can give a positive review for next time!  Wow, just realized I badly need to update my Currently Reading widget... stay tuned!