Fantasy is normally my cup of tea, but paranormal isn't. For that reason, I didn't have a lot of expectations going in. I honestly feel like the story had a lot of potential; it had an interesting premise and I definitely could see myself liking it. Sadly, this really wasn't a book for me. I'm not sure what exactly it was - like I said, the story had a lot of potential - but there was just so much happening at once. The writing included a lot of details about basically everything, and this may be enjoyable for some people, but it isn't for me.

The characters however, are great to me. They were very diverse, and also quite relatable. I have to give credit for the fact that both them and the story itself were inspiring, and for that I am giving it 3 stars. This book just wasn't for me, but I can definitely see other people liking it!

At first glance reading the blurb and seeing the cover i was intruiged. It seemed so interesting, but sadly this was not for me. I was more or less confused and bored the whole time. The story went ..but it felt bland? i didn`t get a real connection to any of the characters either.

I really enjoyed reading this book, the characters were great and I really enjoyed the plot and use of magic.

I am not going to give a bad rating to this book, since it was just not my cup of tea. I kind of suspect it maybe wasn't but decided to take a chance seeing other raving reviews. But alas, it is really not the kind of writing and story I enjoy. I couldn't get through the first chapter so leaving a bad rating behind would not be fair.

Thanks for giving me the chance to see if this book would grab me.

I try to keep an open mind when reading a genre that I don't particularly love, but I just did not enjoy this as much as I hoped I would. There was nothing wrong with the plot. The characters were kind of interesting. Yet for the life of me, I could not follow what was going on. There was way too much background info on all of the characters, so the first thirty pages were exposition. We also kept switching perspectives between at least four people, plus Jo's journal entries meaning that we switched regularly from third person to first person. The most disorienting factor was the sci-fi/fantasy part itself, because the narration went into WAY too much detail about Jo and her Lightbody and the Council of Creation. Unfortunately, this was not done in a comprehensive way, and there was so much sci-fi terminology used that I kept losing track of what was going on. Halfway through, I couldn't bear all the backtracking and just read through it, even if I didn't understand. Obviously this didn't make for a fun reading experience.
It was nice to see all sorts of representation amongst our cast, but the extreme level of detail that we were given was just confusing. They all seemed to have traumatic backstories, which lead them to routinely ditching class and smoking weed. That got a little dull... it's also necessary to have a disclaimer warning younger readers that these characters are not good role models. I didn't like or dislike Jo, but so much of who she was seemed to be interconnected with her Chosen One status.
Two and a half stars.