Book Review: Relentless by Karen Lynch

Sara Grey’s world shattered ten years ago when her father was brutally murdered. Now at seventeen, she is still haunted by memories of that day and driven by the need to understand why it happened. She lives a life full of secrets and her family and friends have no idea of the supernatural world she is immersed in or of Sara’s own very powerful gift.

In her quest for answers about her father’s death, Sara takes risks that expose her and her friends to danger and puts herself into the sights of a sadistic vampire. On the same fateful night she meets Nikolas, a warrior who turns Sara’s world upside down and is determined to protect her even if it’s the last thing she wants.

Sara’s life starts to spin out of control as she is hunted by an obsessed vampire, learns that her friends have secrets of their own and reels from the truth about her own ancestry. Sara has always been fiercely independent but in order to survive now she must open herself to others, to reveal her deepest secrets. And she must learn to trust the one person capable of breaking down the walls around her.

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Let me just start off by saying that I am in a reading slump. Now, let me tell you that after reading this book, I don’t think that I am in a reading slump anymore. I don’t know if that effects my opinion, but I’m going with it.

In this book we follow Sara, and a bunch of other things, as a bunch of things go on. It sounds really confusing, I promise that it isn’t! It’s just hard to say what goes on in the book without spoiling everything. I’ll just tell you a summary of one thing. So, Sarah has this friend named Remy, and Remy is a troll. Trolls are very powerful in this book, and their bile (vomit) is like the fountain of youth. It heals wounds and bodies. Sara sells rare items on the black market (for supernatural beings), and in return uses the things that she gets during the trades to help other beings. Then, she gets attacked by a vampire who starts stalking her. Don’t worry though! There are a TON of other supernatural beings looking out for her.

It may seem like there is a lot going on in this book, and there is; the author wrote everything so that it wasn’t confusing (unlike this review). There were a lot of supernatural beings though. There were vampires, werewolves, trolls, Mohiri, and Fae. Those are what I remember, I believe that there were more though. From what I heard about this book, I thought that the trolls were going to play a big part in the storyline. While they do play an important part, the story mostly focuses around the vampire, the Mohiri, and the werewolves. Also, while you may be able to compare this book to others, it is still very original.

One thing that I liked about this book was that there was no real romance. Yes, there were hints of it here and there, but no big romance. Sara didn’t fall head over heels for Nikolas, which was very refreshing. While I do think that they will have a relationship in the next few books, I was very glad that they didn’t have one in this book.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book! It could be scary, fun, and exciting all at the same time. While it did get me out of my reading slump, it just didn’t have enough to make it a five star read for me. In the end though, I would recommend this book.

4/5 Points

I really, really, REALLY enjoyed this book.