When I started reading this, I remember being slightly perturbed that the narrative voice was that of Ethan – a masculine viewpoint and one that I had not yet stumbled upon in my readings of the genre. Now that I have finished the book, however, I feel that presenting the book from this perspective was ingenious – and perhaps the reason for the success of the book. I was immersed in a world where family and lineage are, above all, the most important aspects to life. Who a person is and what he/she is going to become is predetermined and depends more on the family a person hails from than the person himself. A person is not allowed to be different. Ethan Lawson Wate belongs to this world just as much as the world belongs to him. It is an uneasy possession – at least on his side, because the world he is in is fast limiting his horizons and there is nothing he wants more than to leave. Of course there are people there he loves – Amma, the housekeeper who practically raised him, his best friend Link and his father who is almost drowned by the grief of his mother. Then there is the girl he keeps on dreaming about – the girl he keeps on losing in his dreams. Ethan is almost convinced that she is a figment of his overly vivid subconscious until she shows up in town.Lena Duchannes. And it is love. Despite all the odds stacked against them, despite the time limit on their fledgling relationship. Despite the fact that everyone in the vicinity believes she is a demon incognito and perhaps because of the fact that Ethan’s life would be much simpler, much less complicated if he could simply stop loving her.The book took a while to grow on me. Usually I start reading a book and either I love it or I hate it. But perhaps it is because I was reading this book while I was (actually I still am) on vacation. It took me a while to get used to the male perspective as I said but ultimately the story won me out.The characters are individuals who are all uniquely hewed and have more of a role in the story than just space fillers. The plot is well thought out and researched. Stohl and Garcia approach the same story that has been told countless times in a fresh way that imbues the plot with a newness that has been missing. By narrating the story from the lead whose main role usually is as a side-kick to the heroine’s, the readers are distanced from the heroine. However, instead of feeling detached from her and her life, the reader feels, more acutely, what her uniqueness is. Stohl and Garcia succeed in creating a hero and heroine who capture (and keep) attentions until after the story is done. They somehow are more relatable than their contemporaries in the genre. Amma in Hindi (Urdu, too, perhaps, it’s Omma in Korean) means “Mother” and the fact that Ethan’s Amma is his mother in everything but blood made me smile. I don’t know if it was an intentional naming and if it was, it was very clever and I appreciated it. I am going to give this book four stars because, while I wasn’t totally blown away by it, I really did like Ethan, Lena, Link and even Ridley. I liked Uncle Macon, Aunt Del and Boo Radley. The strength of the book lay in its characters and I will most certainly be checking out the next installment in the series to see what happens to Lena and Ethan next.
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