I wasn't quite sure what I was expecting with The Path Keeper, but I'm not sure it was quite for me. It was very slow in the world building and I often felt like I was missing something. There are a lot of YA tropes like the bad boy romance that some may enjoy, but the characters didn't quite land for me so I felt like their relationship didn't feel as fulfilling as I wanted it to.

The Path Keeper isn’t just another story about a girl falling for a guy, or a “damsel in distress” novel. It is so much more than those simple descriptions. The Path Keeper is a story placed in modern day, but will walk you through times far to long ago. The story follows the life of Ella, your typical young adult who just so happens to have the mouth of a sailor & a knack for taking the difficult path. In particular, the difficult path of falling in love with the “wrong guy”. Zac is a mystery that Ella desperately tries solving. He keeps a lot of secrets that slowly start unraveling the more he comes around Ella. That isn’t all though. Both Ella & Zac are thrown through trial after trail, testing how much they can actually handle. Can they do it? Can love always find a way? “Can love ever be stronger than fate?”



I’m not going to lie. At first, I was really iffy about The Path Keeper. It was a little bit out of my typical reading style. Just a tad bit, but enough to make me nervous. That feeling didn’t last very long AT ALL because just 6 short paragraphs later Ella came into the story. Oh, how I loved Ella’s character! She isn’t a weak, little girl who needs saved! She’s strong and beautiful. I gotta admit, I kinda felt like her & I had a lot of similarities. As for Zac, you wouldn’t believe how many notes I have screaming at him and asking what the heck was going through his mind. Without going into much detail or spoilers, Zac has reasons. He breaks down at the perfect pace throughout the story. Keeping you turning page after page hoping for more! Just as Zac & Ella do, you learn how to (impatiently lol) wait because it’s 100% worth it.



I would highly recommend this to anyone who is looking for a new series to become immersed in. As a side note, there are curse words as mentioned above. Ella has quite the vocabulary. There are also a couple of very nicely put romance scenes that may not be very appropriate for really young ones. It is done very classy though so it isn’t a Fifty Shades of Grey kinda thing. Other than that, everything about this novel will leave you begging for more. Trust me..I literally started begging the author for spoilers of the next one haha.



As Ella’s mom, Felicity, states, “What is meant to be is written in the stars & I have grown to accept it.” Let me be one of the first to tell you, you reading this story is meant to be. It is written in the stars. Just make sure you have plenty of free time before you start because you won’t want to put The Path Keeper down. ( )

Any book that claims to be a mix of Game of Thrones, Twilight, and A Court of… in their presser, I’m going to be intrigued, as are I’m sure numerous other adult YA fantasy fans. While The Path Keeper by NJ Simmonds is a decent read that hooked me in enough to have me keep an eye out for the follow-up, it’s also sure to be divisive among readers, and with good reason.

I enjoyed generally enjoyed the story. Steady pacing that increased as we reached the climax made The Path Keeper a breeze to read through in practically one sitting, with the intrigue as to how the pieces we’re given fit together making you want to keep reading. Protagonists Ella and Zac don’t truly get a chance to stand-out, which could end up being a good or bad thing depending on how deeply a reader needs to have that connection to enjoy a book. I think a lot of groundwork was being placed and perhaps character building and development was brushed aside for future installments. Even still, the mystery of why Ella and Zac couldn’t be together was enough to carry me through the finish and leave me wanting more. There are breadcrumbs of worldbuilding and mythos that we will hopefully see as the series progresses and there are definite shades of the Blue Bloods series by Melissa de la Cruz, but only crumbs and only shades.

That said, The Path Keeper by NJ Simmonds was a bit difficult to get into at first. I didn’t understand the need to make Ella a Spanish transplant to England other than to showcase the author’s own parentage and love of travel. The speech itself does not feel like that of someone who is Spanish first and English second/English at home. I myself am bilingual raised in a bilingual house, as is a friend I consulted with when asking if i was the only person finding issue with the speech, and it simply feels like an English speaker using Spanish words every now and then instead of genuine code-switching. Once Simmonds stopped awkwardly forcing Spanish words into English sentences, the novel became so much easier, interesting, and genuine to read.

Another issue that will be incredibly dividing among readers will be the idea of predetermination. While the summary makes it sound that everything is already laid out before we’re born and it’s this very mystical type thing, the actuality of it being the person being reborn mapping their own path to take makes what happens to Ella a very difficult and bitter pill to swallow.

WARNING TO FOLLOW FOR SPOILERS AND MENTION OF ASSAULT.

Bad things happen to Ella — a mother that doesn’t care, cool okay, that sucks but it happens. But what really makes this idea of people choosing what happens to them offensive is having sexual assault and harassment be explained away as a thing a person chose in order to prove themselves. Not only does that sound like really horrible victim blaming, but also being assaulted and harassed isn’t a test of anything? People who ‘can’t overcome’ being assaulted/harassed/etc aren’t weak or failures. It shouldn’t say anything about them. I personally can’t ever think of a single time where I’d choose for something like that to happen as a test. A test for what? To see if you can push through? A test to see how others react? It’s a disaster of an idea that is just extremely offensive to any survivors that might pick this up.

END WARNING

The Path Keeper by NJ Simmonds is a divisive novel that blends youthful romance and ideals with more intense adult themes that may not always work depending on the audience. If you enjoy YA tropes but want them in a more adult setting, and are willing to place faith that an author knows their world and will develop it in future books, then this might be something you’d quite enjoy. If, however, you’re looking strictly for something YA or something adult, or want something fully developed with amazing characters from the start, you might want to wait and see what happens with the follow-up.

// I voluntarily reviewed a complimentary copy of this title. // ( )

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I liked the cover. I probably should have read a bit further before requesting it on Netgalley. Ella has it all in London, but she can't find her place until she meets her stalker, ehm love interest. He spends the entire book saying how he always loved her, through all her previous lives. That is not scary at all.

It was one of the most cringe worthy romances I read in a long while. After she meets Zac there is not a single thing besides him that she can do or think about. He will break the rules, just for her. Add to this a random attempted rape, which was completely glanced over, and a rather ridiculous subplot about Ella's parents and I found I was not really caring any more about any of the big revelations with the angels, who may or may not play a part in life.

It was a fast read, sure, but I never got into the story. The characters don't really have a personality besides loving each other. This was definitely not for me.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for providing me with a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review! ( )

Thank you to NetGalley for providing a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

Yet again, I prove myself incapable to keep my own time frames, and ran out of time on this book before it was archived. I swear, every time I get a book on NetGalley, life immediately decides that I don't need to have free time or drive to read. Anyway. I'd gone on my usual hunt through the libraries to see which books I could borrow and read, so that I could get them the reviews they'd been promised, and was lucky enough to find THE PATH KEEPER at one of them. And when my hold came through, I curled up in my new reading chair and set to reading.

And is so often the case, I devoured it in two nights.

I had no idea what I was really getting into, from the synopsis of the story. YA novel, two kids not supposed to be in love, very dramatic. Okay, cool! I'm on board for that. "The brutality of GAME OF THRONES," the blurb says.

...In a YA novel? I'm paying attention.

And I'll argue that point, honestly. It's brutal for a YA novel, sure. But it's not Song of Ice and Fire. I can't speak to the correlation to COURT OF THORNS AND ROSES since I haven't read it yet, but I can also cast a bit of hesitation on the correlation to TWILIGHT too. Both forbidden romances of sorts, sure. But in such wildly different ways, it's hard to think of them in the same breath. Edward has NOTHING on Zac.

NOTHING.

But I'm a sucker for reincarnation and angels, so it was easy for me to be dragged along by this story of a girl who meets a boy who changes her life, and the boy who knows he's made all the wrong decisions and still can't stop himself. It feels like Simmonds is trying a little too hard sometimes to make the story "grown-up" with the cursing and the sex, and while I suppose it fits, it doesn't seem necessary? I do admit that this may be a personal bias, however, so it is what it is. We do get a glimpse of some of the past lives, and that can be a bit jarring when you're not expecting it--and we have an interlude near the end of the book with a step-brother that I do not understand the purpose of in the slightest other than as a catalyst for other actions--which, given the subject matter, isn't enough to warrant its inclusion.

But by the end of the book, I was still invested in our main characters, I was looking forward to seeing what happened, and I was off and running to Twitter to flail at the author since the next book isn't out for MONTHS yet. So now I wait, to see where Zac and Ella's story goes from here, how Lily and Leo will fit in, and what all happened in the past that led them to where we found them now.

Sign me up for the ARC list for SON OF SECRETS, please!

Rating: ***.5 - Definitely Worth a Look ( )