Review: The Temptation by Alisa Valdes

The Temptation by Alisa Valdes
Release Date: April 24, 2012
Format: ARC, 320 pages
Publisher: HarperTeen
Series: Kindred #1
Source: Won on First Reads

Description from Goodreads:
His touch was electric.
His eyes were magnetic.
His lips were a temptation....
But was he real?

After crashing her car on an empty highway, Shane is miraculously saved by Travis, a mysterious cowboy who walks out of nowhere. She is instantly attracted to him, and for the first time, she believes in “soul mates.” But Shane soon discovers that Travis is dead and that strict rules from the Underworld govern kindred spirits of different dimensions. Breaking these rules could destroy both their souls. And while Travis is almost impossible to resist, temptation proves to be the kindest enemy they encounter.

Can true love surpass the power of pure evil? Part love story, part supernatural thriller, this first book in the Kindred trilogy will leave readers lusting for more!

I entered to win this book because it seriously looked good. The description drew me in, as did the attractive boy on the cover. Plus, it's published by HarperTeen, and I could not remember ever disliking a book published by HarperTeen. Sadly, though, I thought I'd like this book a whole lot more than I actually did.

The Temptation is a ghost story, a love story--pretty much, just a run-of-the-mill YA paranormal romance book like the many we've all seen so much of as of late. To be quite honest, this book bored me. I found my attention wandering often as I read this book and had a hard time getting into it. I couldn't connect with this story at all, really, which made it a tedious read.

I DID like some of the termonologies Alisa used in this book, though. Instead of just calling it "Hell" she said "Underworld" and things like that. There were some things that could really have made this book unique and riveting. The characters had a lot of potential, too, but they didn't live up to it. Speaking of characters . . .

Character rundown! We have Shane. A character I feel nothing for. We know very little about her. She had no arc or anything in this book, which probably had to do with the fact that a character needs to be developed to begin with before one can develop into anything better. Next we have Travis. AH, TRAVIS. Travis is a gentleman. I respect that. He is genuinely kind and caring to people and animals alike. He is the character we learned the most about and connected with the most. Actually, I think he was the only character we could connect with in any way. This said, he was the only character who had anything like an arc. I really liked Travis. He was the character that made me want to stick with this book until the end.

Other than Travis, though, there was not really any character developement. We had a lot of potential in Shane and Kelsey and Logan, but we got virtually nothing from them. Logan didn't do much at all in the book--he only seemed to be different everytime we saw him. The only thing that was consistant was his blood-lust, I suppose you may call it, and that turned out to not be very defining, anyway. Kelsey did pretty much nothing, either, except be a tattletale. The character issue was important to me because if I can't connect with the characters, I have no way of connecting to the story. There WAS a little potential gem in here who was not Travis, and that would be Travis' brother Randy. I suppose we shall see in book 2 . . .

This book was a very cliche-type YA paranormal romance. Everything you'd expect to pop up in a book like this does. Which sounds great if you're a sweetness-lover like me, right? WRONG. It made The Temptation even more boring and predictable. Plus, the insta-love in here was too sudden and unbelievable to really amuse me. Travis was a sweet guy, but that's all that interested me as far as this went.

The ending. Before I get to the very end, I have to say some things about the 20-ish pages before that. Quite frankly, I did not want to read them. For reasons I'll let you discover on your own, my favorite boy in this book was not present in them. Which made me care about what they had to say about 0%. When one character is making the whole story for me and that character is pulled out for certain circumstances, my interest in what I'm reading evaporates. Now, the ending. I WILL be reading book 2 when it comes out. Because, yeah, there was a cliff-hanger. Not a cry-worthy one, but still a cliff-hanger nonetheless. Which means I need to know what will happen next, naturally. Plus, remember my comment on Randy? Well, I see some potential for him to be more involved in the next book! Which means I'll have to check that out when I can. I won't rush, though.

Overall, I didn't really enjoy this book. Just wasn't really my cup of tea. If you like ghost stories where ghosts find their soulamtes and other things happen that I'm not going to recount in this sentence because I'm just not, then you should certainly give this book a whirl. Who knows, maybe you'll like it more than I did.

Thank y'all for reading my review! Be sure to stop by the blog again tomorrow for the Redheads are Soulless blog tour! I'll have an interview with the author: Heather M White. Because Heather's AWESOME.

Have a great day, Friends!

♥Jessica(: