Josin L. McQuein

This book has an excellent premise -- a world divided between creatures who are "normal" and The Fade, creatures who are deterred by light. The Fade are introduced as evil but end up being more complex. All great. The action starts rights away and therein lies the problem -- as a reader, I didn't know or care about the characters at all, so there were no stakes in the action. Also, the characters weren't that interesting -- and there's very little to no humor. I'm beginning to see this as a broad failure in a lot of YA (and scifi and dystopia) -- this heavy, lugubrious, pretentious tone that makes all of the stories flatten.… (altro)

Meridian by Josin L. Mcquein the exciting sequel to Arclight, draws distinguishable lines between the Dark, the Grey and the Arclight. In the Arclight, things go on as usual … except that the Fade – a race that was once feared – are slowly integrating in with the humans. But all is not as it seems. Although the Fade are docile, the Dark holds greater enemies, different hives that aren’t happy about the humans and Fade resisting them. Marina, a.k.a Cherish, needs to convince the Arclight’s elders and leaders that the Fade are not responsible for the recent attacks. In other words, Honoria Whit, who Marina thought was her arch-enemy, needs to be convinced.

Meridian is a dark adventure, where all our favourite characters come back and fight for survival. The charcter growth is immense, new facets of personalities (and histories) are revealed, but McQuein keeps the reader entertained by sticking to what we love.

I personally enjoyed seeing the character growth in Honoria. In the first book she was made out to be such a monster, but Meridian is more sympathetic to her. As for the Marina/Cherish battle for dominance (a split personality if ever there was one), it was laid on a bit too thick for my liking, but it was crucial to the plot, so even that was alright.

Of course, something else that I enjoyed was the conflict between Rue and Tobias. These two characters were somewhat enjoyable, especially in the sense that they know just how to get under one another’s skins.

All in all, Meridian was a good book. Personally, I didn’t think it was as good as Arclight, but it set up the plot for a fantastic third book and I can’t wait to see where McQuein takes the story.

(review originally posted on www.tentaclebooks.com)… (altro)