Paranormalcy, Kiersten White review

Plot summary from Goodreads, because I love the official summary:

Evie’s always thought of herself as a normal teenager, even though she works for the International Paranormal Containment Agency, her ex-boyfriend is a faerie, she’s falling for a shape-shifter, and she’s the only person who can see through paranormals’ glamours.
But Evie’s about to realize that she may very well be at the center of a dark faerie prophecy promising destruction to all paranormal creatures.
So much for normal.

Review:

You know how Dracula sometimes makes the reader want to put wooden stakes and garlic around their room? This book made me want to invest in iron knuckles and put them under my pillow. There were scenes in this book that terrified me, not from gore but just a sense of helplessness, that "THEY COULD BE ANYWHERE CREEPING INTO YOUR BASE AND TAKING YOUR SOUL" sorta feeling. Paranormalcy was much scarier, and even sadder, than I expected it to be.

But the rest of the book was "Pink, Shiny Love," to quote from one of the chapter titles. There is a LOT of fluff in this book. I personally liked it because it was mostly enjoyable fluff, but if you're not a fluff person I would steer clear. There's a lot of humor, too, and good humor: I giggled through most of the book.

I was surprised by how much I liked Evie. If I knew her in real life, I'm pretty sure her perkiness and cluelessness would annoy me, I'm sorry to say. But reading from her point of view, and seeing everything that is normal to me seem special and fresh and exciting to her, was invigorating and interesting. It was like, everything in the book that is paranormal to me is normal to her, and vice versa if she was reading my life. Her voice did annoy me a few times, especially at the beginning, but overall much more enjoyable than I thought she would be.

I LOVED LEND. That is all. ^_^ I liked his paranormal power, and his mixture of bizarreness and normality, and his parents, and his cuteness, and his humor. Yay!

I also loved the werewolves. OH and I loved how the vampires were all corpsy. XD Yay for no sparkles!

Good grief I loved most things about this book. I hated Reth, but I loved hating him, sooo there you go.

Let's see, plot. Well, like I said, there were some sad and scary parts to this book that I was not expecting at all, which contributed to the plot, which meant that yes, I was pretty surprised by several twists in the story. I basically went into this book with all the wrong expectations, because after certain things happened in the story, I was left adrift with no point of reference. Which was GOOD! I enjoy NOT being able to predict things, or at least not all of it. I had noooo idea what was going on with the glowiness (that's a pretty non-spoilery term, right?), or how it would be resolved.

Rating: 5/5

Recommended for: readers of paranormal romance, of course, but I'm not a huge PR fan and I loved it.

Contains: teen romance, danger, hilarity, snark, paranormals.

My other 2010 debut reviews are listed here.