Splintered Souls (Flames of Time #1)
by Erica Lucke Dean
Rating: ★★★
Review Copy: ARC
Synopsis: When Ava Flynn walks away from a scholarship to Georgetown and moves into her grandmother’s abandoned summer home in coastal Maine, she steps into the center of a centuries-old curse. On her first night, she notices a mysterious leather-clad stranger looking up at her third-story window. For weeks, everywhere she goes, Ava catches more glimpses of him, but she can never get close enough to find out who he is.

Over three hundred years ago, Lady Catherine Fairchild risked everything to protect her unborn child, sending a ripple through time that would change Ava’s future. As the mystery unravels, the horrifying consequences of Lady Catherine’s choices drag Ava deeper into a world she never knew existed, trapping her in a conflict that’s been raging since before she was born. A winner-take-all battle for her soul.

REVIEW

Gah and dognammit!

I admit to making an ASS out of U and Me here by assuming this would be a little standalone mystery - perhaps a nice ghost story/haunted house jobbie, or that's what I'd guessed from the blurb, anyway. And it certainly was a mystery, with breadcrumb after breadcrumb laid out, and even when we got answers, they felt uncertain and unsafe. So, needless to say, when the book ended in a horrendous, massive and quite literal cliffhanger, I turned the air around me blue for a good five minutes, because I really was ready for it to be wrapped up and done with.

As a mystery with some fairly clever twists and big reveals, it's going to be very hard for me to say much about the actual story, but in terms of tone, this was quite a young-feeling YA, and would perhaps be perfect for the Twilight, Vampire Diaries, etc., crowd (minus the vamps), as it comes complete with all YA the requisites; new kid at school, love triangle, lots of angsty angst.

I probably wouldn't be tempted to read the next one as I wasn't invested enough, but do bear in mind I'm am not really the target audience here.