Icons review

Icons by Margaret Stohl

From the bestselling author of Beautiful Creatures comes the first book in a heart-pounding series set in a haunting new world were four teens must piece together the mysteries of their pasts - in order to save the future.

Book Synopsis

Your heart beats only with their permission.

Everything changed on The Day. The day the windows shattered. The day the power stopped. The day Dol's family dropped dead. The day Earth lost a war it didn't know it was fighting.

Since then, Dol has lived a simple life in the countryside -- safe from the shadow of the Icon and its terrifying power. Hiding from the one truth she can't avoid.

She's different. She survived. Why?

When Dol and her best friend, Ro, are captured and taken to the Embassy, off the coast of the sprawling metropolis once known as the City of Angels, they find only more questions. While Ro and fellow hostage Tima rage against their captors, Dol finds herself drawn to Lucas, the Ambassador's privileged son. But the four teens are more alike than they might think, and the timing of their meeting isn't a coincidence. It's a conspiracy.

Within the Icon's reach, Dol, Ro, Tima, and Lucas discover that their uncontrollable emotions -- which they've always thought to be their greatest weaknesses -- may actually be their greatest strengths.

Bestselling author Margaret Stohl delivers the first book in a heart-pounding series set in a haunting new world where four teens must piece together the mysteries of their pasts -- in order to save the future.

Thanks to Harper Collins for providing me with a copy in exchange for an honest review.

Shona's review  5 of 5 stars.

When I got the email offering me this book I jumped at the chance as soon as I saw Stohl's name. I loved Beautiful Creatures and I wanted to see if her solo novel was as good as the collaboration with Kami Garcia. Well let me just say this... I was not disappointed. I cannot wait to read the next instalment in this series, and a next instalment there will be. I can't even begin to tell you how happy I was when, I got to around half way through this and I discovered it was in fact the first in a series.

The telling of the story is what truly grabbed me. I haven't read a book like it before. The story unfolds from different POV's. Firstly we have Dol, most of the story is told by her, then throughout the book we also have medical reports (from the future) and classified documents (from the past), which all help tell the story of  the Icons and the Icon Children.

I liked Dol almost immediately. She has had to live with so much because of her abilities as a Weeper, or Sorrow Icon. She is able to feel the emotions of those around her. Which must make it difficult to figure out where others end and you begin. This leads to conflicting feelings which I feel she deals with really well. She acknowledges her mixed feelings about certain characters and she resists the urge to act on them until she is able to work through them in her own head. Some of the other characters weren't so instantly likeable,  but some of that is because we are seeing them from Dol's POV, because as the book unfolds and we learn more about the characters I started to have a better understanding of why they are the way they are.

The book is so well written you don't even realise how much you have read in one sitting until you put the book down and realise how far through the book your bookmark is. If you are looking for a book that wraps up all the questions that popped into your head whilst reading then you are going to be disappointed, while we do get some answers I'm afraid to tell you that by the end of the book we have more questions left unanswered than we find answers. Normally this would leave me frustrated, but there is just something about the way Stohl has written this that it wasn't even an issue for me. It has left me excited to read the next book... which I guess is always the plan for the author of a series.

Praise for Beautiful Creatures

'Gorgeously crafted, atmospheric and original. I devoured it' Melissa Marr, NYT bestselling author of Wicked Lovely

'Watch out Twilight and Hunger Games' Guardian

'This novel has been generating Twilight-level buzz' Teen Vogue

Margaret Stohl is a lifelong science fiction fan, former video game designer, and co-author of the New York Times bestselling Beautiful Creatures series. She lives in Los Angeles, California, with her family.