1. Sanctum - Sarah Fine

Guards of the Shadowlands #1

audio read by Amy McFadden (she's really good)
listened to on my iPhone while traveling back & forth to Maine, Dec. 2013

purchased from Audible for $1.99 (the audio division of Amazon)

2012, Brilliance Audio
(10 hrs. 41 minutes)

433 pgs.

Written for YA

Finished on flight from PA to Phx 1-4-2013

Genre: Dystopian Fantasy

Goodreads Rating: 4.10

My Rating:   2/It was okay (well, sort of....)

Setting: Rhode Island and Hell

My comments:  I am not a young adult - and there's way too much endless, mushy teenage romance for me, and way too much of the heroine -- who's supposedly smart and brave --- stupidly making selfish decisions that hurt everyone she cares about. Why would you not share important information with the one person you really trust?  Why keep so many secrets?  It's the same feeling I have about Twilight's Bella and Edward ... Lela and Malachi are just Bella and Edward in a different situation. Good stuff here, too - I love her take on Hell - this part of the setting is great, and the bad guy characters she's created.  Very clever.  However, (for me) the story's about 200 pages too long.  However, will I read book two?  Yup!

Goodreads:  A week ago, seventeen-year-old Lela Santos’s best friend, Nadia, killed herself. Today, thanks to a farewell ritual gone awry, Lela is standing in paradise, looking upon a vast gated city in the distance—hell. No one willingly walks through the Suicide Gates, into a place smothered in darkness and infested with depraved creatures. But Lela isn’t just anyone—she’s determined to save her best friend’s soul, even if it means sacrificing her eternal afterlife.   

          As Lela struggles to find Nadia, she’s captured by the Guards, enormous, not-quite-human creatures that patrol the dark city’s endless streets. Their all-too-human leader, Malachi, is unlike them in every way except one: his deadly efficiency. When he meets Lela, Malachi forms his own plan: get her out of the city, even if it means she must leave Nadia behind. Malachi knows something Lela doesn’t—the dark city isn’t the worst place Lela could end up, and he will stop at nothing to keep her from that fate.