He’s enigmatic, compassionate, generous and intelligent. Likes classical music just as much as kicking ass and knows his way around a kitchen, though he’d never admit it. His Samurai swords are an extension of his personality and a lifetime of heartache has taught him to wield them unfailingly. He’s gorgeous yet humble and can’t see past his own scars. Lucien feels deeply for his chosen family and is absolutely worthy of love.
Sounds perfect, right?
The only problem is that Lucien is a character in a novel.
The Dark Riders is one of the bestselling paranormal romance series of all time, and it was destined to have eight installments, one for each of the brothers-in-arms. Lucien’s story was supposed to be book eight, where he’d finally find true love and live happily ever after. Except the writer died before his story was published. Worse yet, book seven was finished by some poser that thought killing off one of the main characters would bring a more modern twist to the finale.
Chloe is absolutely devastated by the news that one of her “friends” is dead and that the series is canceled. She has a quasi-nervous-breakdown at work and ends up falling asleep in the lounge. Her midnight escape from the locked office lands her in a deserted parking lot after hours where an unseen force has been waiting. Just. For. Her…
The devastating attack strands her in an alternate reality where the Dark Riders are real and the horrible ending created by the publisher hasn’t happened yet.
Chloe decides that she’s been brought there to fix all of the storylines, and tries her best to convince the monsters around her that she’s there to help. She ends up mangling their plots more often than not and now must race the waxing moon to find a way home before Lucien accidentally falls in love with her instead of his destined mate. The Fates are working against her as Chaos interferes and the truth about what really dragged her over threatens to destroy everything that Chloe holds dear.
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Before I even start this review I need to mention the fact that I felt like I was tricked. When I read the summary for this book, I thought that this story was absolutely cute since Chloe, the main character, is an average girl who literally gets into the final series of her favorite novel. There’s just something fascinating about reading a book about a book. But what I didn’t expect was it to be so highly disturbing coming to the end.
Chloe is a badass woman with some serious self-esteem issues and is also pretty much anti-social. However, the one thing Chloe truly loves in the world is the characters in this novel series called “The Dark Riders”. When the author unexpectedly dies and a known male writer is asked by the publishers to finish up the last novel the author was working on, Chloe is totally livid.
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It’s really funny how she treated the novel as part of her life and how distraught she is when the female protagonist of that book is murdered; she goes into the employees’ lounge in her workplace to cry. What’s even funnier is that fact that when she actually comes face to face with the characters she’s admired about for years, they don’t react to her as if she was a close friend at all. I mean, I would also be pretty skeptical too if someone said that they came from another world and knows everything there is to know about you.
What I also liked about Chloe’s encounter with her favorite novel characters is that the story became real for her. At one point in time when Chloe was revealing secrets that the characters never even knew about themselves, she was wondering why they weren’t reacting to the secrets as she did when she first read them in the novels. I mean, how could she expect them to? To her it was just a story and to them it’s their lives. Still, I did like that when she was trying to relate to them she tried to imagine what it would be like if someone was reading about her and knowing everything about her. That part was really cute because….you know…people really are reading about her.
Then there’s ghoulishly attractive Lucien who has similar low self-esteem and who hasn’t found his “destined mate” as yet. It’s kind of annoying how obvious it was that Lucien and Chloe would fall madly in love with each other despite constantly denying their affections. Still, making Chloe’s love interest a wounded, scarred man with black marks all over his body was quite the welcomed change from the ever jaw-dropping gorgeous men often found in many New Adult novels.
Anyways, throughout the novel, Chloe gets the opportunity that many readers would kill for; the opportunity to change the ending of a beloved book. But it comes with a price (like everything usually does). And this is where shit gets seriously weird. Chloe realizes that she’s an important part in the story and that she was the apple of a very powerful demon’s eye for a very long time. Yup. And it doesn’t stop there. Nope, it gets even weirder. When it looks like all is about to come to a terrifying end, she figures out that she’s been the hero of the story in a way that would make Tim Burton proud.
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All in all, FANGIRL_15 was a really different read from what I’m used to and I’m glad that I got the chance to read it.
PS. I’m guessing that the book is named FANGIRL_15 because Chloe used that username in an online forum dedicated to “The Dark Riders”.
Rating: 8.5/10
Book Info:
Publisher: Patchwork Press (July 8, 2014)
Source: Netgalley ARC
Genre: New Adult, Sci-Fi & Fantasy
Completed: July 2014
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