Release Date: January 6/2014
Acquired: E-ARC provided by publisher
Goodreads: ADD
Purchase: Amazon/Indigo/Book Depository
In this darkly imaginative debut novel full of myth, magic, romance, and mystery, a Princeton freshman is drawn into a love triangle with two enigmatic brothers, and discovers terrifying secrets about her family and herself—a bewitching blend of Twilight, The Secret History, Jane Eyre, and A Discovery of Witches.
Arriving at Princeton for her freshman year, Thea Slavin finds herself alone, a stranger in a strange land. Away from her family and her Eastern European homeland for the first time, she struggles to adapt to unfamiliar American ways and the challenges of college life—including an enigmatic young man whose brooding good looks and murky past intrigue her. Drawn to the elusive Rhys and his equally handsome and mysterious brother, Jake, she ventures into a sensual mythic underworld as irresistible as it is dangerous.
In this shadow world that seems to mimic Greek mythology and the Bulgarian legends of the samodivi or “wildalones”—forest witches who beguile and entrap men—Thea will discover a family secret bound to transform her forever . . . if she can accept that dead doesn't always mean gone, and love doesn't always distinguish between the two.
Mesmerizing and addictive, Wildalone is a thrilling blend of the modern and the fantastic. Krassi Zourkova creates an atmospheric world filled with rich characters as compelling as those of Diana Gabaldon, Deborah Harkness, and Stephenie Meyer.
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I can't. I was finding everything well, and quite poetically beautiful, until I realized that I was literally holding a raging hormone. A seriously raging one. Wildalone was a mashing of genres, with 'romance' coming out as the clear winner. I kept on reading for the Greek mythology, and Krassi's obvious talent for vivid scenery, but I could definitely have done without the aspect that has people comparing it to Twilight: love-triangles. An annoyingly insistent one.
Thea Slavin has newly arrived at Princeton, to start her life as an academic, piano prodigy, and self-appointed private detective. Fifteen years prior, a prominent member of her family was left for dead on the Princeton grounds, the body having completely vanished after it was found. Soon, Thea is collecting idioms, and acronyms, and being asked, at the last minute, to perform at a solo piano recital after the original performer falls ill. It is there that she happens upon her first silhouetted stranger lurking in the shadows. The other stranger comes soon enough, and before long, Thea is having wildly frivolous rendezvous with each of them, at different times. It was here, after her first forced outing with Rhys (the brooding one), that I began to lose interest in the narrative. Which was a true shame, because with the book opening with the Greek folklore about the samodivi (Slavic forest witches), I was definitely expecting a story line with more substance.
I felt like Wildalone was trying to be too many things at once, which caused some of the more interesting sub-plots to suffer. It's as though Krassi was asked to try her hand at writing the next big Twilight fan-fic piece, because by the end, that's pretty much all I took away from this book.
Recommended for Fans of: Twilight, Fifty Shades of Grey, Erotica, Romance, Greek Mythology, Paranormal.
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Krassi Zourkova grew up in Bulgaria and came to the United States to study art history at Princeton. After college, she graduated from Harvard Law School, and she has practiced finance law in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, where she currently lives. Her poems have appeared in various literary journals. Wildalone is her first novel.
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Thank-you to Trish from TLC Book Tours for hosting this tour, and to Harper Collins for sending me a print copy to review! CLICK HERE to follow the rest of the tour.
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