This book gave off Twilight vibes from the outset. I kept half-expecting bad boy protagonist James to confess he is a vampire (he doesn't). This book doesn't contain a Happily Ever After, or a Happy For Now ending, so if that's important to you, maybe you might not enjoy this.
On a prose level, this books wasn't too badly constructed.
The plot goes as follows:
- Best friend since childhood, Victor, is in love with Leath.
- Leath loves Victor deeply - just not in the way he wants. That's okay, though, because he's willing to wait for her.
- But wait, there's a new student in town, a mysterious bad-boy with a troubled past and #secrets. James is immediately in love with Leath, and - despite some misgivings - she falls quickly in love with him.
There are minor subplots about college choices and Victor briefly dating Annamae, Leath's best friend (in a transparent attempt to make Leath realise what she's missing. It doesn't work.).
Then we find out that James has been lying about his past. He's not an orphan from Columbia, he's from another world Judaculla. In Judacalla, women only bear boys, and their soul mates are chosen by their mothers at birth, and inserted into their lover's dreams. When they reach marriagable age, they must go into the human world, get their soulmate to fall in love with them, and trick them to come into Judaculla, where they will be constantly mistreated until they fall pregnant. Once they bear a child, the cycle continues.
It's not super clear why the men *have to* mistreat their wives. James' dad refused to, so instead, he sent her back to the human world, because he loved her too much. It seems to me that sharing dreams with your future wife - essentially growing up together in the dream world - would make it difficult to mistreat them.
It's also not explained why the women only bear boys, and, really, why that's a problem, since they seem to have no issues with getting wives from the human world.
It's not clear why the men cannot return to the human world after they have married.
James falls in love with Leath and decides he loves her so much, there's no way he will bring her back to Judaculla. So he leaves her the day after she is in a car accident. Because of magic she forgets him (hence the title "Fading"), and thinks she's dating Victor. But that doesn't feel right. When she comes off the sleep meds, she remembers James, but Victor, and everyone else, thinks her memories are a symptom of concussion.
James appears to Leath in a dream and says goodbye, and that he will always love her. She wakes and races to Judaculla. The portal opens, and Leath steps inside.