carolesrandomlife

This review can also be found at Carole's Random Life.

This book was captivating from the very first page. I will admit that I expected this book to be something completely different than it turned out to be but I am thrilled with what it is. This book was completely different than anything else I have read and I enjoyed every single moment of it. This is was very odd but I was engrossed by the story.

This is one of those books that if someone had explained the plot to me and told me to read it, I would politely agree while I secretly thought that they would out of their mind. If I were to try to explain this story, I couldn't do it justice. In fact, I don't really want to say too much about this story at all because to do so could very easily spoil the story.

This book probably has the most interesting cast of characters that I have ever encountered. Carolyn is one of the librarians and is rather odd but over the course of the story she grew on me. She is really the main focus of the story and drives a lot of the plot. Steve is thrown into the action blindly and really has no idea what is going on. Steve was the most realistic character in the book and I found him to be my favorite. Erwin was around for much of the action and proved to incredibly smart. I must say that I really fell in love with the lions in this story.

There is a lot of action and quite a bit of violence. This is definitely a book for adults and there is some rather graphic violence. I was actually surprised by how much action was crammed into this book. The action really kept the story exciting and made the book very hard to put down.

There were some really unexpected twist and turns and the overall flow of the story kept me guessing. This was one book that I can honestly say that I had no idea where the story was headed for a large part of the book. I have to admit that I am a little let down the ending which is the only reason that I didn't give it 5 stars.

I really liked the style of the writing in this book. I thought that the author did a fantastic job of giving the reader just the right amount of information as they needed it. The parts of the story that told about past events had a greater impact for me because of where they were placed in the story. The pacing of the book was incredible. I read this book within a 24 hours period of time. I would highly recommend this book to readers who like a dark fantasy set in our world. This is a book that I could see myself picking up again in the future. This is the first book by Scott Hawkins and I can't wait to get my hands on his next novel.

I received an advance reader edition of this book from Crown Publishing via Blogging for Books for the purpose of providing an honest review.