ARC REVIEW: THIEF OF LIES by Brenda Drake

Title: THIEF OF LIES

Summary: 
Gia Kearns would rather fight with boys than kiss them. That is, until Arik, a leather clad hottie in the Boston Athenaeum, suddenly disappears. While examining the book of world libraries he abandoned, Gia unwittingly speaks the key that sucks her and her friends into a photograph and transports them into a Paris library, where Arik and his Sentinels—magical knights charged with protecting humans from the creatures traveling across the gateway books—rescue them from a demonic hound.

Jumping into some of the world's most beautiful libraries would be a dream come true for Gia, if she weren’t busy resisting her heart or dodging an exiled wizard seeking revenge on both the Mystik and human worlds. Add a French flirt obsessed with Arik and a fling with a young wizard, and Gia must choose between her heart and her head, between Arik's world and her own, before both are destroyed.

Author: Brenda Drake
Series: Library Jumpers #1
Source: eARC via the Publisher
Publisher: Entangled Teen
Publication Date: January 5, 2016
Rating: 2.5/5 stars

Purchase:

Amazon | Chapters | TBD

Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
 
I am actually sad to be writing this review right now because I wanted to love THIEF OF LIES because it sounded as though it had the makings to be a wonderful book. Alas, it fell short. It was more about the "sexy" than about the plot and I found myself wishing to be done the novel rather than enjoying reading it.

This book had so much potential, in my opinion. The plot is well thought out and I didn't mind that it was similar to others before because obviously I enjoyed those novels, so I would have enjoyed this one too. Except I didn't. Because I had to listen to Gia call Arik "sexy" about a billion times. It was so out of the blue and not the Gia that is described in the summary that I almost DNF-ed the book after the first "sexy" to be honest.

And this review is going to focus on the horrible romance instead of the plot. Why, you may ask? Because the book also focused on the romance instead of the plot. It was so romance heavy that I almost missed that there was an actual bad guy in the story and not just "hot" Veronique being the bad guy for making googly eyes at Arik. But the worst part about it is that the bad guy and his motives and the prophecy and all that were the best parts of this novel. They were so much stronger than "forbidden love" and "hot wizard betrothal" that I savoured the couple of paragraphs we got about the evil and the training, even though a lot of it felt like a history lesson nobody asked for.

I really, really, really wanted to like this one. I wanted to be enthralled by the libraries that we went to (which was minimal, tbh) and I wanted to be swept up in a fantasy world (also minimal) and even swept up in a background romance (not this blech we got). But none of that happened. It just felt like a bit of a waste to me. There was such intricate world building that was used solely for the purpose of a forbidden romance that most likely won't be forbidden by the end of the series.