Fated by Sarah Alderson

Title: FatedAuthor: Sarah Alderson

Series: Fated #1

Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK

Date Published: January 5, 2012

Buy: Amazon

Goodreads Summary

What happens when you discover you aren’t who you thought you were? And that the person you love is the person who will betray you? If your fate is already determined, can you fight it?

When Evie Tremain discovers that she’s the last in a long line of Demon slayers and that she’s being hunted by an elite band of assassins –Shapeshifters, Vampires and Mixen demons amongst them – she knows she can’t run. They’ll find her wherever she goes. Instead she must learn to stand and fight.

But when the half-human, half-Shadow Warrior Lucas Gray is sent to spy on Evie and then ordered to kill her before she can fulfil a dangerous prophecy, their fates become inextricably linked. The war that has raged for one thousand years between humans and demons is about to reach a devastating and inevitable conclusion. Either one or both of them will die before this war ends.

If your life becomes bound to another’s, what will it take to sever it?

After finishing the Hunting Lila series, I felt really lost and lonely because that’s how you feel 

after finishing a good series, anyway so I started hunting (pun intended) for other books written by the author and came across Fated. It came of sounding a bit clichéd but by this point I had become a Sarah Alderson fan so I put aside my assumptions and picked this book up. I don’t think there are words enough to say how glad I am I did that. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have met one of my all-time favorite guys nor read one of my all-time favorite series.

This was Sarah’s second book and I can see the different between the Hunting Lila and Fated. I wouldn’t say that it was that she got better as a writer (she was already awesome in my book), but that I liked Evie’s character a lot better. I always admired Lila but sometimes the whole Alex thing got on my nerves in the first book (although the second book was a bottle of awesome, no doubt). In this book you can see that Evie is a very independent character. She isn’t used to depending on people after all the things that happened to her recently. She was betrayed by her best friend and boyfriend, her father died and her best friend died. This all happened in a short span of time so it changed her as a person. She became more closed off. She has always wanted to get out of town but now she wants it more than anything else. She cannot stand the stares. So she works extra hard at the restaurant (owned by a family friend) to earn money. It is during one of these shifts she has to fight off these weird creatures she didn’t know existed and it is there she meets Victor and learns that she is a hunter.

On the other hand we have Lucas, *swoons*, one of my favorite love interests, who is a half human and half shadow warrior. I don’t think I can get enough of this guy (I love you too Alex (the one from Hunting Lila) but let’s keep this about Lucas shall we?). He has this very serious demeanor about him. I wouldn’t call him a brooding bad boy or anything along those lines because he isn’t that. He is a responsible person who has been through a lot. He saw his mother die when he was a kid, his father died recently and became the only shadow warrior to be killed at the hands of a hunter, he wants revenge. He is given his chance to infiltrate the hunters’ ranks and get his revenge when he is given the assignment to kill Evie.

This book is a combination of action, spice and everything nice. Now to paraphrase that, this book is full of action, sizzling romance, awesome paranormal stuff and chemical X (that being Sarah Alderson’s magic dust).

I believe that the romance between Evie and Lucas is perfect. They meet in an interesting way, there is an attraction present but the romance is slow to develop, both with Evie’s being closed off and with Lucas trying to kill Evie.

The concept of fate always gets messed up in books, it either comes across as too cheesy or well to confusing. Here it was neither. Sarah managed to make everything make sense yet give her characters some sort of choice.

She also does an amazing job with the world building. It is unique to what you usually come across in YA. She builds a world that manages to intrigue me and builds it along the way, she doesn’t just dump info about this world on us, she shows it to us.

This book could have easily become a common cliché with all the paranormal books out there, hell it could have become a reincarnation of The Mortal Instruments but Sarah Alderson manages to make it unique amongst all the other paranormal books out there.