by Aine Crabtree

Title: The Thief
Author: Aine Crabtree
Book: #1 of Archetype
Published by: MJ Lane Publishing LLC
Genre: Paranormal Fantasy
Found: Amazon
Rating: 3.5 voodoos

Jul Graham doesn’t know what to expect when she’s sent to live with her grandmother after her father’s abrupt disappearance, but it certainly isn’t a private school full of foreign students and a magic mirror in her backyard. Her new best friend is a blonde girl who speaks Japanese, and all of the adults – including her grandmother – treat Jul like she’s some sort of time bomb. On top of that, she’s a subject of interest to her new classmates, who don’t seem entirely normal themselves. What is Havenwood hiding?

I was expecting something like Vampire Academy or Night School and what I got was clever and different but it wasn’t as polished or witty as Vampire Academy and didn’t quite have the mysterious is-it-isn’t-it edge of Night School.

I struggled with quite a lot of The Thief. Firstly I found the changing point of view a little disorientating. Yes it gave us a good insight into the different characters but at the same time if you weren’t really paying attention to who’s POV you were in then you easily missed important bits or got confused.

I really liked the spread of characters, There was the good hearted humorous Mac, the quiet, rebellious and sometime scary Camille, there was the sweet and innocent good girl Jul and the solemn and grouchy Rhys. There were some good secondary characters too in Destin, Hyde etc. I also enjoyed the Magic Mirror aspect of this story. It was sort of like traveling mirrors, mirrors could take you between dimensions/worlds. It was clever.

To be honest I think the only thing this story needed was clarity. To me there was just so much information. Come on you have to admit, when most of these characters were super-human, fae-related beings from another dimension you need a little time to get your head around what each different type can do, let alone get to understand all the inter-dimensional politics. And its not like it was just explained in one go, because the adults were all trying to hide something from everyone else! So you had to just pick up information as you go and hope that it will make sense in the end.

I’m not sure whether I will pick up the next in the series. I just don’t think I felt that much of a connection to any of the characters to make me want to jump back into this weird world but you never know.