The Watcher of the Night Sky: The Aronia Series Book One
By Rachel Pudsey
The basic plot of this book is actually really interesting. It’s a story of love—overwhelming love—and dark magic, family secrets, and of course teenage angst. Abigail Crumble doesn’t like romance. She’s boyish from head to toe, even her personality is closer to a male’s than a young female’s.
I thought Abigail was a good character, especially the play on her name; Crumble. That alludes to a lot more than readers think, you’ll find out when you pick up a copy of the story.
Fifteen years without love might sound like a long time but Abigail Crumble has learned to live with it. She’s only in high school after all. There comes a time when even this tom-boy realizes that love just might be worth a try. Abigail decides to make a wish for her sixteenth birthday, she decides she wants love and attention but she gets so much more than what she bargained for.
A string of boys show up at Abigail’s doorstep professing their endless love for her. She doesn’t just get love and attention, Abigail becomes an obsession. Desperate to get away from the overwhelming romance, she decides to try to cancel the sudden wish. Thus the real story begins. Why does Abigail’s wish come true and why can’t she do anything to stop it? But then, what kind of girl complains about such juicy love???
The Watcher of the Night Sky is definitely not your average romance. I enjoyed it very much and would recommend it to YA readers and all fans of romance. Those who enjoy supernatural love stories will especially enjoy this, though it’s not a vampire romance! The characters are all full of life and plenty of humor with Abigail serving us the serious side of things. We watch her grow as she struggles with the problems that arise in this story which demonstrates some of the great character development in this book.
Now here comes the hard part.
I really did enjoy this book, it has an awesome take on the YA romance genre and adding in the magical aspect made things all the more interesting. But there were some big errors in the writing. Almost every sentence in this book could be cut in half. There are probably more commas than words, to be honest. And there’s just an unnecessary amount of character description. Brown hair and eyes is all I pretty much need to know unless a person’s height is integral to the story. Unless the length of their nose, the size of their shoes, or what they’re wearing on Tuesdays is going to play some sort of role in the book then I don’t care about it. I’m not saying Pudsey did this but there was a large amount of detail that didn’t need to be there.
Despite the overuse of commas and lengthy sentences, I still greatly enjoyed this book and will strongly recommend it to others. I actually look forward to the rest of the series.
*I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review*