Toward a Secret Sky by Heather Maclean

3.5 Angels vs. Demons stars!!

Hardcover, 368 pages

Expected publication: April 4th 2017 by Blink

Original Title

Toward a Secret Sky

ISBN

0310754747 (ISBN13: 9780310754749)

Shortly after 17-year-old Maren Hamilton is orphaned and sent to live with grandparents she’s never met in Scotland, she receives an encrypted journal from her dead mother that makes her and everyone around her a target. It confirms that her parents were employed by a secret, international organization that’s now intent on recruiting her. As Maren works to unravel the clues left behind by her mother, a murderous madness sweeps through the local population, terrorizing her small town. Maren must decide if she’ll continue her parents’ fight or stay behind to save her friends.

With the help of Gavin, an otherworldly mercenary she’s not supposed to fall in love with, and Graham, a charming aristocrat who is entranced with her, Maren races against the clock and around the country from palatial estates with twisted labyrinths to famous cathedrals with booby-trapped subterranean crypts to stay ahead of the enemy and find a cure. Along the way, she discovers the great truth of love: that laying down your life for another isn’t as hard as watching them sacrifice everything for you.

My opinions…

Okay first off the picture of this cover does not do it any justice.  I have  a physical copy of this book and it is gorgeous!  I know my rating is a little low on this book and I will get into why but I think this will be one of those series that gets better with each book.

Toward a Secret Sky follows a main character named Maren, and her life definitely isn’t puppies and rainbows.  She seems to be hit with blow after blow in this book, what I really enjoyed about her character was her ability to just keep getting back up and say, okay what’s next.  Maren is sent to live with her grandparents in Scotland after her mother dies.  She has never met these grandparents before, and after meeting them and encountering some of the townsfolk some new things begin to unfold.

This book was chalk full of tropes, insta-love, daughter not knowing her real heritage, angels vs. demons.  While it had all of these tropes it still reeled me in with its unique take on it all.  (the insta-love still made me cringe) There are rules about the demons and angels fighting but the rules aren’t exactly clear yet.  There is a human faction/abbey working with the angels.  However this place has rules of its own, it seems like quite a strict place to be.  Every tiny bit of information the author threw at me I gobbled it up.  I just couldn’t wait to see what was around the next bend the next turn.  Some things were of course were predictable,but that ending though… that hurt a little.  I finished the book thinking wait that can’t be it? Where is the rest?

I was really torn on how to rate this book because of all of the tropes, but yet this author brought a lot of fresh light to an otherwise tired plot.  I really feel this series will just get better and better with each book.  It has a lot of potential to go somewhere and be the next big thing. I’m excited to see what the next book is like, and where she takes the characters from here.  I feel by the end of book one Maren had already really come into her own a little.

Thank you to Blink publishing and Heather Maclean for my copy in lieu of my honest review.

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