Incarnate by Jodi Meadows

Title: Incarnate
Author: Jodi Meadows
Series: NewSoul #1
Publisher: Katherine Tegen Books
Date Published: January 31, 2012
Buy: Amazon

Goodreads Summary

New soul

Ana is new. For thousands of years in Range, a million souls have been reincarnated over and over, keeping their memories and experiences from previous lifetimes. When Ana was born, another soul vanished, and no one knows why.

No soul

Even Ana’s own mother thinks she’s a nosoul, an omen of worse things to come, and has kept her away from society. To escape her seclusion and learn whether she’ll be reincarnated, Ana travels to the city of Heart, but its citizens are afraid of what her presence means. When dragons and sylph attack the city, is Ana to blame?

Heart

Sam believes Ana’s new soul is good and worthwhile. When he stands up for her, their relationship blooms. But can he love someone who may live only once, and will Ana’s enemies—human and creature alike—let them be together? Ana needs to uncover the mistake that gave her someone else’s life, but will her quest threaten the peace of Heart and destroy the promise of reincarnation for all?

So while I am wandering in the state of deciding when I want to pick up Asunder again, I decided to write a “better” review for Incarnate.

Incarnate has a great concept. Usually pretty covers trick me, I’ve been tricked into reading so many books because of pretty covers, against my will. It’s not my fault, they demand to be read. So I didn’t go into this book with a lot of expectations.

Reincarnation is a complicated concept and for an author to get it even somewhat right is hard. Jodi Meadows aced it.

When you are reincarnated you aren’t going to have the same features nor will you be the same gender each time. There are so many books where the person, when reincarnated, is always the same gender. Reincarnation is about the soul, not looks, not gender. Their appearances will always change no matter what. So anyways this doesn’t happens in this book, people have been reincarnated as both men and women and it’s about the soul instead of the person.

Ana being the new soul has only lived one life, the one she is living right now. She doesn’t have the experience everybody else has, so for her it’s more about the gender and looks. Of course what annoys me about Ana is that she is stupidly naïve. It seems  like she is an 8 year old instead of an 18 year old at times, although I understand why. I won’t be able to accept it because I haven’t lived under her circumstances hence I have no rights to judge but I AM allowed to have my own opinion. She is the reason I didn’t give this book the whole 5 stars.

Sam is a great character. I loved him. I laughed so much when he was complaining about teen hormones. He has been alive for a long time but the author doesn’t make him seem like a wise-ass but neither as a stupid person. The years that he has been alive has made him who he is. They have made him mature, yet weakened him. The different ways he has died has made him afraid of quite a few things. i.e. dragons.

Aside from that, the whole science fiction and fantasy thing totally works here. I love how Heart isn’t a backward place but at the same time it’s a magical place. Weird creatures exist and we get to meet them.

There could be a lot of improvements to this book, but as a debut and as the first book in the series it works perfectly. There is a plot of sorts and the quest of self-discovery. Ana isn’t totally done with the self-discovery part and she shouldn’t be, because that would be too easy, she has a lot of things to learn and to accept that she, as a new-soul, isn’t a bad person.

This book also does a great job of introducing us to the world of “The Range”. The author could dump quite a bit of info on us occasionally but it didn’t bother me. The world she has created is wonderful.

I look forward to seeing what awaits for us in the sequel.