The Shadow Society by Marie Rutkoski

Title: The Shadow Society
Author: Marie Rutkoski
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Date Published: October 16, 2012
Buy: Amazon

Goodreads Summary

Darcy Jones doesn’t remember anything before the day she was abandoned as a child outside a Chicago firehouse. She has never really belonged anywhere—but she couldn’t have guessed that she comes from an alternate world where the Great Chicago Fire didn’t happen and deadly creatures called Shades terrorize the human population.

Memories begin to haunt Darcy when a new boy arrives at her high school, and he makes her feel both desire and desired in a way she hadn’t thought possible. But Conn’s interest in her is confusing. It doesn’t line up with the way he first looked at her.

As if she were his enemy.

When Conn betrays Darcy, she realizes that she can’t rely on anything—not herself, not the laws of nature, and certainly not him. Darcy decides to infiltrate the Shadow Society and uncover the Shades’ latest terrorist plot. What she finds out will change her world forever . . .

In this smart, compulsively readable novel, master storyteller Marie Rutkoski has crafted an utterly original world, characters you won’t soon forget, and a tale full of intrigue and suspense.

“How can you interpret the behavior of others when you’re a mystery to yourself?”

From reading the summary you can tell this book is full of cliches. I am not going to deny it because it IS.

So why did I give it a 4?

Because the book surprised me. Parallel dimensions have always interested me. Yes Unraveling had them as well but in Unraveling it was more theory then actually exploring the other dimensions. I like the theory a lot better in Unraveling but in my own mental theory parallel universes don’t have to be completely different, there may be one thing that is different that may change the course entire universe. Such is the case of this book. In the alternate universe in this book, the Chicago Fire never happened so a lot of things that don’t exist in the Main character’s universe exist in the alternate universe.

I also love things involving agencies. I mean common who doesn’t? Although there isn’t much of a mystery involved. Most of the things were obvious and there were wayyy too many coincidences but at the same time the book was good.

So were the characters.

Darcy is a rather odd name. She was named after a cat because they found her when she was 5 and she didn’t remember anything. Moving on as you can read from the summary, Conn betrays Darcy. Of course it’s obvious he will try to make up for it but Darcy questions everything he does after the betrayal. She doesn’t run into his arms. She even hates him for a short period of time. I mean she takes the fact that he may have messed up seriously!!! So many girls in YA don’t. Which sucks. But it is what it is.

“There can be second chances. But maybe it’s also true that things can never be the same, and that you have to decide whether the second chance lives up to the first.” 

Conn. Um he is an okay character I suppose and I am glad he did his job despite his feelings for Darcy. He isn’t close to being my favorite male lead but seriously I warmed up to him over the course of time.

This book is good for a rainy day and you know it’s one of those rare books you wished had a sequel. This annoys me because there are so many books that have sequels and I don’t care for their sequels but read them because I am obliged to do so. But the few books for which I would LOVE to read a sequel.. stand alones. Oh well.