Review: 3/5 for Torment by Lauren Kate

Torment by Lauren Kate

Hardcover, 452 pages

Published September 28th 2010 by Random House Children's Books
Source: eBook, Purchased
Buy the Book: Amazon : B&N : Goodreads

From Goodreads:

Hell on earth.

That’s what it’s like for Luce to be apart from her fallen angel boyfriend, Daniel.
It took them an eternity to find one another, but now he has told her he must go away. Just long enough to hunt down the Outcasts—immortals who want to kill Luce. Daniel hides Luce at Shoreline, a school on the rocky California coast with unusually gifted students: Nephilim, the offspring of fallen angels and humans.
At Shoreline, Luce learns what the Shadows are, and how she can use them as windows to her previous lives. Yet the more Luce learns, the more she suspects that Daniel hasn’t told her everything. He’s hiding something—something dangerous.
What if Daniel’s version of the past isn’t actually true? What if Luce is really meant to be with someone else?

After debating back and forth when I finished Fallen, I finally decided to continue on to this book. Fallen lacked in a lot of areas for me, but friends recommended I should carry on with the series because they felt it picked up for them in Torment. I am certainly glad I listened to them. While there are some things I wish would just be taken care of, there were several things introduced that gave this book some pep.

Luce discovers she's headed to Shoreline from Daniel. Of course, there is secrecy involved with every action he takes. On the plus side, several new and interesting characters are introduced at the school. These characters end up playing a more crucial part in the story that what I thought they would. They are more true to Luce because of their backgrounds. She does grow quick a bit in this book, but is still held by the boundaries that Daniel sets. He does elaborate on the grand scheme of things, but just enough to irritate me. I continually hope that one of other characters will just bluntly state the situation, but their allegiance is unwavering.

The beginning of this book is as slow as Fallen was, but Luce instigates a series of events that finally gets the ball rolling. It is not a page-turner, but it does keep the plot going at a decent pace. Some events involving Luce seemed a little unbelievable or simply irrational. A lot of it seemed out of character for her. It was slightly predictable, but the book just simply stops at the end. I'm not sure if it qualifies as a cliffhanger for me, but I'm sure most it would probably feel that way.