The Chosen One • The Awakening of Leeowyn Blake

The Awakening of Leeowyn Blake by Mary Parker

Series: The Kahl'Nar Saga #1

Publisher: Self-published
Publication Date: August 25, 2010

Source/Format: Publisher (Thanks!) || e-book
[I received this book from Mary Parker. This in no way affects my review.]

I'm a normal teenager. I have a normal teenage life with normal teenage problems. The summer is my heaven. I live with my mom during the summer months. We stay in her tiny condo in Jacksonville, Florida. My parents split up when I was little. I'm not sure why. My mom never talks about it. Whatever it was, it was bad enough to make my mom pack me up in the middle of the night when I was four years old and run to my Gran's condo. My mom got the condo after Gran died. From that time on all I had known my entire life was beach life. Until four years ago. Until my uncle found me.

The Awakening of Leeowyn Blake just blew me away. I had no idea what to expect as I started reading this novel, but what did end up transpiring was something spectacular! The book is by no means perfect, but it’s pretty darn good.

The Character

Leeowyn is not your typical heroine – she doesn’t know how to fight at all and she has absolutely NO idea what’s going on. The fact that she’s completely and utterly normal is definitely part of her charm. Eventually, she demonstrates qualities that make me like her even more: loyalty to her family, a drive to do the right thing and intelligence coupled with curiosity. The one thing that I thought was peculiar about her was how easily she accepted the reappearance of her father’s family in her life, as well as the fact that she lived with them for part of the year – that was definitely weird.

The Story

The first bit, the part I consider the introduction, was a bit rough. It did introduce Lee’s peculiar situation, but I think I would have been able to do with a shorter version of it, or even without it at all. I feel like the information from that portion could have just been inserted later into the story.

I’m glad that I continued reading, because the story turns out to be interesting and compelling. I thought initially that the story was based on mythology, which I would have loved, but I was dead wrong. I’m actually glad I was wrong because the background and legend presented to us was really cool. Though at times I would get confused about the new knowledge (just as Lee did), the gist of it came across really well and effectively captured my interest. The story combined familiar paranormal elements into something I’d never read before.

The Writing

Mary Parker definitely used the insertion of dreams/visions to her advantage. Whenever one of these happened in the book, they helped to move the story along, instead of just being random information dumps where someone comes along to explain what’s going on. Plus, they totally upped the creepiness of the tale.

The world is shown to us, as I mentioned earlier, but I felt it could have used more elaboration. As it is, the setting is quite limited in this novel and I feel like, should there have been more locations, we may have learned a whole lot more about the world. 

Personally, I say you should…

… read this novel if you’re a fan of discovering new worlds and the stories behind them. This is a great debut, and I am really looking forward to reading more in the series.