Review: Paranormal Public

Paranormal Public by Maddy Edwards
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Whilst this is far from being the best read I have ever picked up, it was certainly addictive. In fact, it was way more addictive than I had anticipated it to be.

It reads a lot like every other young-adult urban fantasy book out there. We have the academy for the paranormal teenagers. We have a main character with a sob story of a backstory. We have the special snowflake aspect. It is something that has been done before, and yet I found myself unable to put it down. In many ways, if this kind of story is done right, it will always be interesting – and whilst this wasn’t done perfectly, it was done a lot better than many others have done it.

I’ll start with the good.

The story has more than just the standard options when it comes to the supernatural. Quite often these supernatural school settings are limited to the high school life of vampires or the children of gods. This one differs as it’s a higher education setting with all kinds of creatures in one place. Through this, we get to see some fun interaction between different creatures. Rather than simply having vampires and werewolves, which has been a favourite since Twilight, we’re also given some other creatures such as fallen angels and fairies.

For me, finding out all about the different kinds of creatures was a lot of fun. Watching how they interacted was one of my favourite aspects of the book. The hierarchy between the creatures, the way in which there were unspoken rules, was really enjoyable. It was somewhat childish at times, yet it allowed us to watch the characters grow throughout the book. Admittedly the development was somewhat limited on that front, but it does set up promise for the future books.

Plus, as I’ve already said, it was super addictive. Despite the bad points, which I will get to shortly, I was curious to see what happened next. I found myself saying ‘just one more chapter’ every time I finished a chapter, as I needed to see how things played out.

Now for the bad.

Things were so predictable. This links in with how it is like so many other books out there. There really were no surprises. Everything was obvious. The bad guy. The powers. The way in which things would play out between characters. There wasn’t really much by way of surprise. You knew what you were getting way before it was revealed to characters, even before suggestions were made. It wasn’t enough to ruin the story, but it did lessen the enjoyment at times.

There was also the fact that certain scenes seemed to be thrown in pointlessly. It was as though the author really wanted a certain thing to play out, despite how it didn’t really seem important to the story. Almost as though the author was working through a check list in regards to what this kind of story must include.

Overall, however, it was super addictive and I had a lot of fun with it.

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