Sapphire's Destiny by S.L. Perryman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Sapphire's Destiny starts out very interesting; though I'm not a big fan of first-person present-tense, the beginning drew me in anyway.

As the book went on, I found some things that didn't seem to fit. The pacing seemed a little
off; the author didn't spend much time on things. I think the book would have benefited from more explanation and expansion within the events that happened; spending more time on the plane flight, or on the walk through the forest, for example. I think it could easily have been made twice as long without the story suffering. Rather than us going through everything with Sapphire, we're often told about things that happened earlier in the book that weren't described. This is done as Sapphire remembering something, something that we would have seen earlier in the story if it hadn't been skipped over.

The dialogue was stilted in places, but perhaps the thing that bothered me most was the unrealistic ways characters often acted. If I was in the position Sapphire was in at the beginning, with Nubby appearing out of a bottle and a cloud of smoke, I would have been more prepared to clunk her over the head with a heavy object than run off on a dangerous mission with her. It certainly would have taken more convincing, and a much more detailed explanation of the stakes, for me to commit to something like Sapphire did, especially with the kind of fear we're told Sapphire has (taking a baseball bat into the basement). There were a few others, but those stood out to me.

I couldn't help but roll my eyes when Sapphire saw Damian, and I'm going to guess that the soul-mate (The Calling) thing didn't just happen to Nubby and Jeremy. My guess would be that the same happened to Sapphire and Damian. As a rule, I don't like it when this happens in a book because it's been done so often.

However, the idea behind the story was intriguing, and the writing on the way to the ritual I thought was very good, along with the very beginning with Sapphire's grandmother. There were a few typos I noticed, but overall the proofreading was fairly well-done. There was some content that I would label as being for teenagers (some language - what most people would refer to as fairly mild) and a few other, minor things, but overall was pretty clean. I enjoyed the book quite a bit; I think the author shows a lot of promise, and the story idea is interesting. I certainly wouldn't be against reading the next book.

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