Book Review: The Sage Chronicles, Book One - Of the Lilin by Paulette Hampton

 

Book Description 

A cerebral novel ~ Dealing with depression, Sage attempts to pull herself into the light. What she finds is better left in the dark.

Synopsis: After the loss of her mother and her stepfather's mental breakdown, Sage Frankle is taken to live with her aunt and cousin at the Englewood Inn. Soon, her aunt arranges for Sage to begin working through her trauma with a psychologist. As time passes, Sage finds that she is far from healing and begins to slip from reality into a realm of darkness she is unable to escape. After the arrival of her cousin's intriguing acquaintance, Sage is forced to realize she is indeed trapped, not by her mind, but by her bloodline. 

My Review

This book starts out full speed ahead and we see how hard Sage has had it and after it was all said and done, Sage went to live with her aunt Madeline. After a traumatic experience as well as a couple of deaths close to her, she's just trying not to fall down a black hole of despair. Aunt Madeline owns an Inn where she rented out rooms to guests and because she loved reading Jane Austen, she named the rooms after some of the characters in the books. I think some of my reader friends will love that fact about this book. 

Lily who is aunt Madeline's daughter, starts acting really strange and I had some idea what was going on but not exactly and boy was I wrong. Poor Madeline has had a rough life and Lily wasn't even aware what her mother had been going through. I felt so bad for her. But demons and archangels can be so conniving and back-stabbing so it seems. In steps Lucien who is all charisma, charm, seduction as well as creepy as all get out. There was just something about him that was...off. I knew right away that there would be a big reveal about who or what he was and I was right. He ended up being true to his nature as well which made me a little sad because I had high hopes for him at one point. 

Some of the secondary characters that I loved were Allen and Thomas. We meet Allen soon after Sage comes to live with her aunt and he's awesome. I loved him right away. Thomas is mysterious, charismatic and the light that was needed to help Sage. 

When a huge twist is thrown into the mix, things really start to make sense to Sage and to Lily but Lily doesn't take the news as well as Sage does. I really thought that Lily was going to explode into a thousand pieces before all was said and done but she does something completely out of left field that I wasn't expecting and it made me truly like her for the first time while reading this. 

While I liked the story, the characters, the world building and the writing, I didn't care for the ending. I wanted more but I'm looking forward to seeing what comes next. 

I give this book 4 out of 5 stars. 

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