Review: The Carrier of the Mark - Leigh Fallon

Their love was meant to be.

When Megan Rosenberg moves to Ireland, everything in her life seems to fall into place. After growing up in America, she's surprised to find herself feeling at home in her new school. She connects with a group of friends, and she is instantly drawn to darkly handsome Adam DeRís.

But Megan is about to discover that her feelings for Adam are tied to a fate that was sealed long ago—and that the passion and power that brought them together could be their ultimate destruction.

Carrier Trilogy:
Carrier of the Mark
Dawn of the Knights (2012)
Age of the Fifth (2013)

Visit Leigh Fallon's website for more information

Review:
There has been so much buzz for Carrier of the Mark over the last couple of months that I was really excited to get hold of a copy and start reading.  I had high hopes for the story but unfortunately I found myself feeling a bit disappointed by the end of it.  I hate to make comparisons between books and it's something I try to avoid doing in reviews but I can't help but compare this to Twilight.  I was shocked by the number of similarities in the plot and there were quite a few instances when I knew exactly what would happen next because it followed the Twilight pattern.  I've seen other reviewers on Goodreads make detailed comparisons to the two books so I'm not going to list all the similarities here but there are a lot of them.

Neither of the main characters particularly stood out for me, they are both OK but I didn't love them.  I'm also getting a bit fed up with the trend for insta love in YA paranormal stories.  Occasionally the author manages to make it believable but more often than not it just leaves me frustrated.  Megan and Adam have been staring at each other for weeks but have barely spoken but the next thing you know they are declaring their love for each other.  Please at least have a proper conversation and spend some time getting to know each other before you decide you're madly in love and can't live without each other.

What kept me reading was the paranormal aspect of the story, I don't want to give anything away so I'll just say I've not read anything else based on Irish mythology before and I found it really interesting.  There was quite a lot of info dumping going on though which I found confusing and I still don't quite understand what makes Megan different to Aine.  I am very curious to find out more about their abilities though and will pick up the sequel just to see how things develop.

Although Carrier of the Mark isn't perfect and there were things that irritated me I do think the series has potential.  As this is a debut I'm looking forward to seeing how Leigh Fallon's writing style grows with subsequent novels and I'm hoping that as she finds her feet as an author the story will become more original as the series progresses.  If she can take her unique mythology and move it in a different direction from Twilight then the series has real potential.

Source: Received from HarperCollins in exchange for an honest review

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