Review: Dark Kiss by Michelle Rowen

Dark Kiss by Michelle Rowen
Harlequin (May 29, 2012)
Trade: $9.99; ebook: $9.99
ISBN: 9780373210473
Excerpt

Favorite Lines: “Grays consume souls. If they give in to their hunger, it can kill a weaker human. Stronger humans can survived losing their soul, but they will become infected–they’ll become a gray, too. Being gray changes them, and grays who feed too much, get too greedy, are incredibly dangerous.” (p. 88, e-galley)

Smart, über-careful, ordinary Samantha—that’s me. But I just couldn’t pass up a surprise kiss from my number-one unattainable crush. A kiss that did something to me…something strange. Now I feel hungry all the time, but not for food. It’s like part of me is missing—and I don’t know if I can get it back.

Then there’s Bishop. At first I thought he was just a street kid, but the secrets he’s keeping are as intense as his unearthly blue eyes. If he’s what I think he is, he may be the only one who can help me. But something terrifying is closing in, and the one chance Bishop and I have to stop it means losing everything I ever wanted and embracing the darkness inside me….

Dark Kiss is book one in Michelle Rowen’s Nightwatcher series. It is marketed toward kids 14 and older according to the B&N website. The heroine is a teenager whose life was forever changed by a kiss. The hero is an angel and part of a team composed of angels and demons sent to destroy a threat to world, of which the heroine is somehow involved.

I started reading Dark Kiss on April 15, but put it down for several weeks. It’s not that the story was horrid or boring, it just didn’t hold my attention over other books which had recently become available. I needed to write this review so I picked the book back up May 29th and flew through its angst filled pages. My fingers itched to put the book down until I hit chapter 13. Then I didn’t want to stop reading.

Some young adult books that resonate with adults. Michelle Rowen’s Dark Kiss was not one of those books. The heroine was not mature beyond her years nor did she come off as on the cusp of womanhood.  Samantha–the heroine–gets kissed by a guy she’s been crushin’ on for years. It’s a soul stealing kiss that changes her. Now she can do and see things she was never capable of doing before the kiss. What it doesn’t do is make her into a cold, uncaring person ruled by her hunger to kiss others. That ability to ignore or manage the hunger to kiss people makes her different from others who’ve lost their souls.

When Sam meets a young guy and finds out he’s an angel sent to stop the soul suckers she  makes a deal with him. She’ll help him find his teammates who are wandering around town if he helps her get her soul back. It’s a great premise and works quite well. I just kept getting irritated with the heroine’s inability to see what was right before her eyes. Thinking back I know it’s because she is so young. She has no life experience to change her initial reaction to different situations. She takes things at face value when an older woman would (hopefully) know better.

Dark Kiss is a book for younger people than I. I expect several plot lines to be picked up in the second installment, Wicked Kiss, when the book comes out in 2013. I wasn’t impressed with the first half of the book, but the story got much better as the action picked up in the second half. Had the heroine not been “special” she would have died many times. Her naivete makes her an easy target for the many supernatural beings who are all following their own agendas. I don’t think I’ll revisit this series.

 

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