What do you do when the one you love brings you to your death?

Awake by Natasha Preston is a young adult contemporary about a girl who doesn’t remember anything before the age of four due to a fire accident.  Scarlett has no drive to bring back her memories until a new boy arrives at school.  Instantly, the two hit it off, but Noah won’t get off her case to learn of what her life was like before the accident.  She begins to brush him off until another tragic accident brings back small parts of the memories.  Now she is questioning her parents who she knows are reluctant to tell her the truth.  Not long after, Scarlett begins to wish she would have left the memories tucked into her head.  Who can she trust?  Awake is full of truths untold, backstabbing love, and psycho cults.

At first, I did not like this book at all.  Literally, the two main characters met on page 1 and were madly in love by page 4.  Insta-love is something that, to me, kind of ruins a book, and the fact that it only took 3 pages for it to happen made me want to put it down.  But, I am glad that I did not.

It took until halfway through the story for the whole atmosphere of the story to change.  With the first part, it felt like the plot was like every other boring contemporary where you follow the relationship into a dramatic situation and then they live happy every after.  The second part however was nothing like that.  I felt like the story took a mystery/suspense role with cults and lies and lots of craziness.  If the first part of the story did not take place, then I would give this book a 4-5 star rating.  I did not want to put the book down, and there were even times when I noticed that I had read 20 pages in almost 10 minutes.

My advice for this book is to keep pushing through.  I think that whether the author meant to or not, the slow beginning does add enough time for the reader to fully understand the situation Scarlett is being put through and the plot development is strong.  The amount of craziness that happens in the middle is such an intense situation that you will want to keep reading.

Overall, I give this book 3 out of 5 stars.  The beginning I rated a 2 out of 5, but the ending, along with the overall feel for the book, I gave a 4 out of 5, so a solid/high 3 is a happy medium for Awake.  The plot is very unique to this book which made reading enjoyable when you hit the action parts.  If you like stories with a crazy plot twist, religion, cults, and psychological thrillers, this is definitely a book for you. 

More Book Information:

Publisher:  Sourcebooks

Published:  4 August 2015

Genre:  Young Adult Contemporary / Mystery

Pages:  352

How I Read It:  NetGalley eBook

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Happy Reading Y’all!