Infatuate by Aimee Agresti

TL;DR angels vs devils conflict in New Orleans

(finished 5/18/15)

I'd been waiting for Infatuate for a while, ever since I read Illuminate back towards the beginning of high school, and somehow I didn't realize it was at the library for a year and a half. Oh well. 

Anyway, I really liked Illuminate when I first read it. I bought the ARC of it when I found it at a thrift store, but I haven't re-read it since then. I actually lent the copy to a friend recently. I can't promise that my memory of Illuminate is accurate, so I'm sorry if I've gotten details mixed up.

Even though I really liked Illuminate, some things have changed since then, I think. Mainly with me and what books I read. Haven's narration stuck out sometimes in Infatuate, though it wasn't bad -- it was just stereotypical introspective narration of a young adult main character. The biggest problem I found was the little mini info-dumps: a lot of times, there were pretty substantial paragraphs to introduce the location, which I found kind of unnecessary. I'd rather have the information spread out rather than Haven dictate where exactly everything is in relation to each other. Nobody really explains a room like that in real life. 

Here, I even sticky-noted an example:

'We followed [Connor] down the worn carpeting to a room with a half-moon-shaped window looking out onto the grounds, a high ceiling with delicate moldings, and framed paintings of pale people from the Victorian era. Long folding tables and chairs were clustered in a heap at the center of the room, waiting to be set up. A bare metal bookcase on wheels sat in a corner. [...] And, indeed, a row of desks in the back was outfitted with a quartet of very ancient-looking phones.' (pg 61)

I understand the need in writing to set the scene, but I think there's a balance between painting a mental picture and just dumping the room into the reader's lap. I'm terrible at spacial reasoning when it comes to reading, so I tend to completely disregard these kinds of paragraphs and just make up my own picture of the room. All I focused on was the tables and phones. I didn't care about anything else. The window, high ceilings, paintings, and bookshelf were nowhere in the scene in my mind. 

And, likewise, her explanations of people went kind of over-the-top, too:

'Gently, [Dante] creaked the door open to reveal a beautiful woman seated on a silk tapestry on the floor. She looked to be in her late twenties and had a long, luscious black onyx mane, sharp features, and flawless cocoa skin. She wore a tank dress long enough to fan out around her [...]' (pg 132)

Again, I get the need for descriptive language, but in first person, "onyx mane" and "cocoa skin" sounds awkward. There's at least one other time that Haven refers so someone's hair as a "mane", which in my opinion just sounds ridiculous. Haven's descriptions sound nothing like how a teenager would describe things. 

I also found a pretty big fault in the fact that Haven and Dante were both willing to lie to Lance. To me, that was a pretty big warning sign that Haven and Lance's relationship needed improving. The fact that Haven would rather lie to him than tell him a truth he probably wouldn't want to hear is bad, especially considering the nature of the lie. 

'I had had the sense, since earlier in the year, that [Lance] belonged to me, that we belonged to each other in some strange, unspoken way that transcended any typical, ephemeral high school relationship.' (pg 98)

If you have that great of a relationship, why are you so against telling him about Lucian? I think that kind of relationship would mean that you two could be completely honest with each other. Like, I know that the two of them are teenagers, and obviously they're going to make some poor decisions sometimes, but I was really frustrated with the fact that neither of them really seemed to trust each other and tell the truth and save themselves a whole bunch of trouble.  

The plot itself was okay to me. It felt like the same exact thing as Illuminate, only with more kids and a different setting. Take that as you will. The plot didn't seem as exciting to me because it didn't feel very fresh in comparison to the first book, but I think that some people probably won't have a problem with it. It's a different scenario, anyway, so it's not a carbon copy plot. The kids interact with the demons (devils? I forget) in a different way than they did with the staff of the hotel. The climax seemed kind of rushed, though, which sucks considering there's almost nothing to be found of the third book in the series so far. 

On a side note, I had trouble keeping Lance and Dante straight at first. I'm not really sure why I kept getting them mixed up, but once I got back into the story line and the characters they sorted themselves out. 

All in all, it was enjoyable enough to read, but it was a freakishly thick book and I think I would have been less interested in it if it weren't for how much I liked Illuminate. The characters could've been a little more believable. 

One last sticky-noted thing: after Sabine refers to Wylie as a hurricane, Haven refers to Lance as a tropical depression. I found that hilarious.