Review: Incarnate by Jodi Meadows

Incarnate by Jodi Meadows
Publisher/Year: HarperCollins January 31st, 2012
Genre: YA Utopian, know the difference!
Series: Yes, it’s the first book in the Newsoul series.
Other Books From Author: Asunder (Book #2)
Source: Borrowed
Rating: ★★
Amazon | Goodreads | @jodimeadows |

NEWSOUL

Ana is new. For thousands of years in Range, a million souls have been reincarnated over and over, keeping their memories and experiences from previous lifetimes. When Ana was born, another soul vanished, and no one knows why.

NOSOUL

Even Ana’s own mother thinks she’s a nosoul, an omen of worse things to come, and has kept her away from society. To escape her seclusion and learn whether she’ll be reincarnated, Ana travels to the city of Heart, but its citizens are afraid of what her presence means. When dragons and sylph attack the city, is Ana to blame?

HEART

Sam believes Ana’s new soul is good and worthwhile. When he stands up for her, their relationship blooms. But can he love someone who may live only once, and will Ana’s enemies—human and creature alike—let them be together? Ana needs to uncover the mistake that gave her someone else’s life, but will her quest threaten the peace of Heart and destroy the promise of reincarnation for all?

In the world of Incarnate, everyone’s been reincarnated hundreds of times while keeping their memories from every generation. On the night Ciana was supposed to be born, the Temple went dark, and Ana was born instead– the first new soul born in 5,000 years. Now that she’s 18, Ana is determined to leave her abusive mother and go to Heart for the truth. Will Ana find out if she has only one chance at life?

That sounds absolutely brilliant! I borrowed Incarnate from the library (JUST LOOK AT THAT COVER. LOOK AT IT.) but because of school and whatever, I picked it up with only 2 days before the due date. I knew I had to renew the book to finish it so I started rightaway to test if all that hype was worth the money. Only Jodi Meadows brandished little of the Revolutionary Reincarnation Theorem that I signed up for, and stomped all over it with Cheesy Romance.

Don’t let the blurb fool you, this entire book is about romance! Ana is rarely doing anything to uncover her past. When she gets attacked by a Sylph (some fiery shadowy thing) and nearly drowns, Sam, a thousand-year-old soul, just happens to be camping, and just happens to save her and just happens to be her reincarnated idol. From then on, their relationship consists of music lessons, almost kisses and… awkwardness. Was it their age difference? What the people of Heart might think about them? It almost seems as if Meadows purposefully kept them apart just to add romantic tension because most of the time nothing is happening. MOVING ON.

The characters are even stranger to begin with. Ana knows her mother, Li, hates her, and after her drowning episode, she thinks that Li hired Sam to save her. I mean… What?!  Li gave Ana a broken compass so she’d die in the wild, why in the world would she hire someone to save her? Ana’s childish and paranoid reasonings deserves some major eyeroll. But that is not to say Meadows’ writing is poor. I loved her construction of Heart as an enclosed city within a pulsing wall and the mystical creatures (draaagons!!) are some areas that we could have explored.

So in the end, I didn’t renew the book.