Review : My Soul to Take

Posted by kay on September 23, 2009 9:43 pm in 4 stars reads | 5 comments

My Soul to Take by Rachel Vincent
Pages : 279
Genre : YA, Urban Fantasy
My Rating : 

From the back of the book :

Something is wrong with Kaylee Cavanaugh.

She doesn’t see dead people, but…
She senses when someone near her is about to die. And when that happens, a force beyond her control compels her to scream bloody murder. Literally.

Kaylee just wants to enjoy having caught the attention of the hottest guy in school. But a normal date is hard to come by when Nash seems to know more about her need to scream than she does. And when classmates start dropping dead for no apparent reason, only Kaylee knows who’ll be next…

I’ve been a fan of Rachel Vincent since I read the first book of her werecats series, and her first YA novel certainly didn’t disappoint!

My Soul to Take is a perfect blend of mystery, romance and action. As a teen narrator, Kaylee is both believable and entertaining. Her family’s mystery, as well as the one surrounding Nash, are partly predictable but also captivating. Banshees are not that common in today’s literature, and it was really great to have a main character that doesn’t bite! I loved the whole setting, and I can’t wait to see where this brings us in the future novels.

Kaylee’s family plays a big role in the story, and although I didn’t like them much, I enjoyed the part they played. In many YA novels, the main character will rely mainly on friends or external characters; here, even though she doesn’t really want to, Kaylee has to share her burden with her family. While Vincent is really good at telling action scenes, I find that she is really great at exploring the complexity of characters’ relationships, whether they are friendships, family’s or love ones.

One of my favorite characters was Tod. I’m not going to say anything about him, except that I liked him, and I hope we’ll get to know him better in the next novel. The same thing goes for Emma; she’s Kaylee’s best friend, and yet she spends most of the novel’s time grounded.

In the end, I had a really great time reading this one. The beginning was a little slow, but it was captivating enough that I didn’t noticed it much – and when I hit the end, I was really sad to see that I had turned the last page.

The second book in the series, My Soul to Save, will be available in 2010. I’d say I have “My Soul to Sell” to get an ARC of this one! Anyone interested? (I know, my sense of humor is really original!) Meanwhile, you can also download for free My Soul to Lose, a short story available online.