Mercy by Rebecca Lim

Book:  Mercy

Author:  Rebecca Lim

Publisher:  Harper Collins

Date:  2011

My grade:  C+

An electric combination of angels, mystery and romance, MERCY is the first book in a major new paranormal series.

There's something very wrong with me. I can't remember who I am or how old I am, or even how I got here. All I know is that when I wake up, I could be any one. It is always this way. There's nothing I can keep with me that will stay. It's made me adaptable. I must always re-establish ties. I must tread carefully or give myself away. I must survive.

Mercy doesn't realise it yet, but as she journeys into the darkest places of the human soul, she discovers that she is one of the celestial host exiled with fallen angel, Lucifer. Now she must atone for taking his side. To find her own way back to heaven, Mercy must help a series of humans in crisis and keep the unwary from getting caught up in the games that angels play. Ultimately she must choose between her immortal companion, Lucifer, and a human boy who risks everything for her love.

My Review

I really, really wanted to love this book.  But I didn’t.  I’m glad I finished it, because in the end, it was alright.  But I had to make myself finish reading it.  I’m not sure why because it seems to resonate with so many reviewers and a lot of my book friends who have read it just love it, but I barely liked it.

A lot of it was very, very confusing.  While I understand that when Mercy wakes up in someone else’s body, it is confusing for her, the parts of her own life that she knows are not confusing to her, yet that is what was confusing to me.  It was really hard to follow and stick with the book for the first half of it. 

The only thing that kept me reading was that I’m a sucker for mysteries.  And I wanted desperately to know what had happened to the girls in the story.  I also wanted to know who Luc was and I had some suspicions about Ryan that I wanted to find out about.  I only managed to find out about one of them, but that made it worth reading until the end.

I'm not sure that I really liked Mercy or any of the characters for that matter.  They seemed sort of flat and not very interesting.  I had a hard time caring about any of them.  Ryan is the only one who made an impression on me and that's probably why I kept reading.  I really wanted to find out more about him.

I don’t read a lot of books by Australian authors, but the 2 I have attempted have not been good experiences for me.  I didn’t even finish the other one and I’m wondering if there might be something that is different about an Australian author’s voice that does not work for me.  I certainly hope not and I’ve never had trouble reading British, Irish or even Scottish authors, so I’m definitely ready to try another Aussie book just to test this hypothesis.

Of course, by the end, I was curious about what will happen next, so I will more than likely pick up the next book in the series, eventually.  It won’t be one that I’m waiting to get at the bookstore on the morning it’s released.

My grade is a C+.  It was probably a below average read for me until the last part of the book, which pushed it up to the top of average for me.

Thanks to Netgalley and to Harper Collins for providing the ARC for me.