Sunday, December 22, 2013

Review: Lovely Vicious by Sara Wolfe

Fire meets ice. Love meets hate.

Seventeen-year-old Isis Blake hasn’t fallen in love in three years, nine weeks, and five days, and after what happened last time, she intends to keep it that way. Since then she’s lost eighty-five pounds, gotten four streaks of purple in her hair, and moved to the Buttcrack-of-Nowhere Ohio to help her mom escape a bad relationship.

All the girls in her new school want one thing – Jack Hunter, the Ice Prince of East Summit High. Hot as an Armani ad, smart enough to get into Yale, and colder than the Arctic, Jack Hunter’s never gone out with anyone. Sure, people have seen him downtown with beautiful women, but he’s never given high school girls the time of day. Until Isis punches him in the face.

Jack’s met his match. Suddenly everything is a game.

The goal: Make the other beg for mercy.

The game board: East Summit High.

The reward: Something neither of them expected.

**This book contains language, some of which may be unsuitable for younger readers.

**This is the first book in the LOVELY VICIOUS series.

Word Count: 67,040



4 Loved it Stars

Review by Jen Hagen

Isis has just moved into a new town and is ready to begin a new school.   She is invited to a beginning-of-the-year school party and makes quite an impression when she punches Jack in the face.  This is her initial introduction to the school population. 

 

Say it.  Say one more thing, pretty boy.  I dare you to.

“You’re pathetic.”

That’s the first time I punch Jack Hunter’s face.

 

Isis is quite the firecracker.  She isn’t afraid to speak her mind and to defend a friend.  Everybody should want Isis in their corner.  She is fiercely loyal.  She goes to the extremes to make certain that her friends are happy, even if it costs her $200 to pay Jack to go out with her friend.

 

Jack is ice cold, shows no emotion and is expressionless.  He is very good looking and is the object of desire for many of the female students.  Isis and Jack throw derogatory comments back and forth to each other.  It’s a game as to who can out-do the other one. 

 

“If it’s a war you want, Isis Blake, it’s a war you’ll get.”

 

The declared war gives Isis something to think about rather than what she faces at home.  Her mother is suffering from a traumatic experience, her father has started a new family, and before Isis moved she was hurt by “Nameless.”  You know that saying 6 degrees of separation?  It’s a small, small world when Jack can provide personal information about “Nameless” and how Isis was hurt.  How could he possibly know that?

 

Jack is evasive and secretive.  He gives away very little about himself except that he needs money to help a friend, Sophia.  Isis would really like to know more about the story of Sophia and why friendships were altered several years ago when Sophia and Jack were caught in the middle of a deception gone bad.  Isis knows the relationship between Jack and Sophia runs deep.  Jack’s secrets all seem to revolve around Sophia and an incident that occurred several years ago changed him into the cold person that he is today.

 

He’s got no heart – or at least, no heart for anyone whose name doesn’t start with Soph and ends in ia.

 

Jack and Isis’s faux friendship kept me laughing.  I loved their antics to one up the other one.   Little by little Isis chips away at Jack’s frozen façade and we see his thoughts interspersed inside Isis’s story.  These thoughts are not a lengthy POV, usually only a paragraph or two,  but it’s enough to get inside Jack’s head.

 

I am afraid of the things I am beginning to feel.  Because I haven’t felt anything new, for anyone new, for so long.  

 

Initially I found the ramblings of Isis to be distracting and I found it difficult to immerse myself in the story.  Once I was able to distinguish what the author was trying to portray with the character of Isis and how she constantly talks, doesn’t think before speaking, and sometimes even thinks out loud,  I was able to proceed with the story and was able to relate to her humor.   The story does end on a cliffhanger and according to Goodreads, the next installment is just a few weeks away with a release date of January 14, 2014. 

 

Barnes and Noble
 



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