Obsidian by Jennifer L. Armentrout
Genre: Paranormal, Romance
Published by: Entangled
Pages: 335
Format: E-Book
Rating: ★
Where to Find: Goodreads | Author | Amazon

So many people on BookTube rave about the writing and books of Jennifer L. Armentrout. I was super intrigued to pick up the first in the Lux series, ‘Obsidian’, to get a taste of the author and see what all the fuss is about. As is usually the case with hyped books, I was disappointed.Plot

Everything about this novel had echoes of ‘Twilight’. Let me point out a few obvious ones:
– Table of beautiful non-human people: the groups of triplets were all gorgeous and socially out of reach for normal humans. They were cold, distant and, in the case of Ash, playing the role of Rosalie, bitchy.
– Two polar opposite best friends who rope the new girl into group activities: Carissa and Lesa, Jessica and Angela counterparts, offered Katy a place in their friendship group, going so far as to invite her to go dress shopping in the closest city. Déjà vu, much?
– Say it, out loud: Daemon and Katy are in the woods and at a beachy lake when the paranormal is discussed. And so the lamb fell in the love with the lion.
– Evil versions of paranormal people out to get weak human: Katy was being hunted by a bunch of evil shadows, opposing the good light of Daemon and co.
– Save me, Edward: Katy is saved on multiple occasions from near-death experiences by Daemon. Somehow, he just can’t help himself from saving her, even if it puts his world in danger. The similarity goes so far as stopping a car from hitting Katy. There was a lot of eye rolling on my part.

Every new chapter, I convinced myself that the content would be more original, that Armentrout would be able to move away from following ‘Twilight’s plot line. Seriously, there are so many similarities, more minor than the ones listed, I’m surprised the publishing company didn’t point it out. Because I was expecting a repeat of ‘Twilight’, nothing about this book surprised me.

Romance

Don’t even get me started on Daemon and Katy’s supposed relationship. It was so back and forth. Katy kept calling him a ‘jerk’, an ‘ass’ and other such names, even saying she hated him, but she was still attracted to him. Daemon knew he was hot, which makes him significantly less hot, and the way he teased Katy about it made me want to slam him. Hard.

Their conversations were filled with a lot of stilted tension. The amount of times Daemon brushed Katy off, and insulted her, I’m shocked she still liked him enough to thirstily kiss him when tensions got to breaking point. I just wanted to kick him in the groin most of the time. He was not charming, he was arrogant, and not the type of boy that’s likely to make my fictional boyfriend list.

I guess, because of Armentrout’s other book titles in the NA genre, she’s good at writing the steamy scenes. I just felt that Katy and Daemon’s chemistry was non-existent. I’ll be interested to read in the other books how they work together as a couple. They sure did spend a lot of time getting on each other’s nerves.

Paranormal

There can’t really be that much originality within the genre, I suppose, because the basic plot is always going to be human girl/boy discovers non-human girl/boy. I liked the term aliens being used, but it was all very generic; an umbrella term for super human beings with every power imaginable. Invisibility, breathing underwater, super speed, shape shifting, being able to freeze time. I think it would have been more successful if just one thing was focused on, otherwise it doesn’t make a lot of sense that the bad guys, or the government for that matter, haven’t tracked them down.

I didn’t enjoy the mishmash of abilities, especially when only super speed seemed to be linked to their light power source.

Overall, I’m going to give ‘Obsidian’ one star. I hated the dialogue between the main characters. The paranormal explanation was just an info-dump of what they were capable of. I’ve never read a book so similar to ‘Twilight’, which made the plot boring and predictable. On some level, I must have been interested in the book, otherwise I’m sure I would have put it down and I will read the sequel, to see if it’s more original, rather than a repeat of ‘New Moon’. If paranormal is your thing, this is for you, but if you can’t stomach repetitive themes or rocky relationships, maybe reading ‘Twilight’ would be enough.