Review: Shadow Marked by Anna J. Evans

Title: Shadow Marked
Author: Anna J. Evans
Genre: Paranormal Romance
Release Date: 05/04/10
Summary:

Samantha Quinn has been in the dark since age six, when her parents sacrificed her sight in a Satanic ritual. She is trying to get over her demonic past, but horrific lifelike visions haunt her. Her intuition gets stronger and clearer after a wild, adrenaline-fueled sexual encounter with Jace, her brother's childhood friend. And now Samantha is more tormented than ever by what she can "see"-and by what she felt in that forbidden encounter...

Samantha must now prevent the deaths she sees in her premonitions and protect her body from the same demon from her twisted childhood. Her dark curse reveals that Jace will be the next victim, and it is crystal clear that she must destroy the demon to protect her love.

Plot: 3.5 Stars
There were two main plot points that I really enjoyed about this novel: the main character being blind and the demons being scary and evil. I've never read a novel with a blind protagonist, and I've been reading too many paranormal novels lately where the demons are bad but sexy, or bad but not scary. The story had a lot of promise and I really enjoyed it, but the end was very rushed and confusing.

Pace: 2 Stars
The events of this novel barely take place over two full days, but it feels like forever. I'm not sure there was realistically enough time for everything that was packing into those two days. Normally I could overlook something like that and just assume it was a very action packed couple days, but for all the action squeezed into such a short span, it was a bit of a drag to read. There were times where the author gave us more details of the surrounding than was needed to get a visual, and other times when there wasn't enough. Altogether it was a bit disjointed for me.

Characters: 3 Stars
I felt as if I really got to know Jace and Samantha throughout the novel, and they really had well rounded personalities and depth, but most of the other characters were very flat and uninteresting. Outside of the two main characters, I also don't think we learned much about anyone else, unless it specifically played into the plot. There were also a few times in which I felt the author had Samantha doing or describing things that seemed like they'd be outside of the realm of possibility due to her lack of sight, but mostly did a good job conveying the issue.

Cover: 3.5 Star
I think the cover model is a good match given the description of Samantha we're given, especially since it was the only way to know what Samantha looks like for a number of chapters. It took so long for the author to give any sort of physical description of Sammy, that for a while I wondered if we'd ever learn what she looked like. Also, I felt that since Jace was such a big part of the story and about 40% of the novel was from his point of view, that he should've been on the cover also.

Overall: 3 Stars

Disclosure: I bought this book for my own enjoyment.