Title: The Fallen
Series: The Nine Lives of Chloe King
Author: Celia Thompson (Liz Braswell)
Pages: 256
Published: 2004
Summary: Chloe King is a normal girl. She goes to class (most of the time), fights with her mom, and crushes on a boy…or two. But around her sixteenth birthday, Chloe finds that perhaps she isn’t so normal after all. There’s the heightened night vision, the super fast reflexes – oh, and the claws.
As she discovers who she is – and where she comes from – it is clear she is not alone. And someone is trying to get her.
Chloe has nine lives. But will nine be enough?
Review: I have to admit before anything that this review is more than a little biased. The fact that I watched ABC Family's show based off of this book before I read the book obviously leads to a bias, but I believe that even if I had not seen the show first, I still would have given this novel the same rating that I have. Maybe one star more, but nothing less.
Chloe King is an average sixteen-year-old girl who has friend drama and teenage sexual tendencies and all of that which makes for an average young adult novel, but the best part about it is that she's not an average sixteen-year-old girl at all. From the beginning of the novel, the prologue that insinuates that she's about to die is intriguing enough to want to pick up the book and read it a little more intently than planned, and it only gets better when she falls off of the top of a tower, but other than that, the book falls short of anything considered spectacular.
Chloe's personality was not what I expected at all, and the fact that she just seems to spend the entire novel whining about the fact that she can't get one guy to kiss her despite the fact that she's already kissed/made out with two others is really kind of annoying. I understand the concept of teenagers being obsessed with sex, lies and drugs/alcohol, but I was expecting a little more out of this book, and I didn't think that it was going to revolve around Chloe's determination to get laid or how much alcohol she was going to drink with her friends.
The friend drama was also an annoyance of the book, and that seemed to take up a large chunk of the novel. Between Chloe and Amy fighting, Chloe and Paul disagreeing, Amy and Paul dating and just the three best friend whirlwind of drama, it was just frustrating. The only character I actually liked in the novels was Aleyc (I will never stop calling him Alek though, because that is what ABC Family has ingrained into my head). His personality was the best out of everyone's.
In my opinion, the worst part of the entire book was the fact that Chloe's powers were barely thought about, almost as if they were an afterthought in this teen drama, and the fact that she didn't even seem to care about them at first, that she didn't care about the fact that she'd fallen off the top of a tower or had claws or could do weird gymnastic moves, was just annoying. I know if anything like that had happened to me, I would be freaking out, so I don't understand her. And the end of the book was the only point where her powers were really talked about, and yet we still really never found out what was so special about Chloe King and why she had all these powers.
I am hoping that the next book is better than this one, but if it is not, I might just give up and not even bother to attempt to read the novels that one of my favourite ABC Family shows was based off of. It was just that bad.
Rating: ★★ 2/5 Stars
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