Tori's Review: Personal Demons by Lisa Desrochers

Obtained: ARC Tour
Genre: Young Adult
Series: 
1. Personal Demons
2. Original Sin
3. Hellbent

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Hardcover - 368 pages
Price: $9.99
ISBN 10: 0765328089
ISBN 13: 978-0765328083
Released: September 14, 2010

Frannie Cavanaugh is a good Catholic girl with a bit of a wicked streak. She's spent years keeping everyone at a distance—even her closest friends—and it seems her senior year will be more of the same...until Luc Cain enrolls in her class. No one knows where he came from, but Frannie can't seem to stay away from him. What she doesn't know is that Luc works in Acquisitions—for Hell—and she possesses a unique skill set that has the King of Hell tingling with anticipation. All Luc has to do is get her to sin, and he’s as tempting as they come. Frannie doesn’t stand a chance.

Unfortunately for Luc, Heaven has other plans, and the angel, Gabe, is going to do whatever it takes to make sure that Luc doesn’t get what he came for. And it isn't long before they find themselves fighting for more than just her soul.

But if Luc fails, there will be Hell to pay…for all of them.

My Rating:

My Opinion:
Ahh, the all-too-familiar love triangle. Do you side with heaven's representative, or hell's? Do you go for the bad boy, or stick with the safe route and fall for the good guy?

Like Frannie, our heroine, I was torn between both men. Gabe was a sweetheart, though he didn't play that huge a role in the first part of the book. Luc was the resident bad boy-gone-good. The girl in me, the part of me that daydreams about helping the sexy hero overcome some obstacle from his past, gobbled Luc up. Jerk tendencies aside (only one scene with him being a true jerk, my sweets. You'll forgive him soon enough), he captured my affections much more successfully than Gabe did.

I thought angels and demons, alive for about 5,000ish+ years, would have a bit more sophisticated language despite trying to fit into the teenage scene. Or maybe I expected that archaic language to slip past their defenses maybe once or twice. This is something I'm struggling with in my own WIP, so I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the modern day ancient's speech patterns.

Frannie's parents bugged me. Likewise, the conversations with people saying "if you hurt her, I'll kick your ass" grew tiresome.... As were the phrases "whatever" and "as you wish". "Whatever" made Frannie come off as more a brat than a heroine I would like. "As you wish" made Luc sound like a genie, which made me chuckle. Not sure if the latter two phrases were toned down a bit in the final print version (I read an ARC), or if they stayed.

Talking about Frannie and Luc, I don't think having both sides written in first person worked. They spoke similarly, and more often than not, the scene switch would confuse me. I ended up flipping back pages to double check and see which POV we were in next after a change. And both say "mmm" way too much, which furthered my confusion during POV swaps.

As tragic as Frannie's brother's death was, I couldn't help but roll my eyes and wish that they would just get on with it towards the end. It always came back to that, and after a while, the pity party got old.

I hope I don't come off as bashing this book. Despite the aforementioned complaints, I gobbled this story up between last night (stayed up til 4AM) and this afternoon. I adored Luc. The interactions and struggles between the trio were mentally exhausting after a while, but they were also funny at the start. So funny, that I woke my mom up the other night because I was laughing so hard/loud.

There's been a bit of buzz about this story. I think a lot of people will enjoy it, despite my complaints. As for me? I'm still looking forward to book 2 in this trilogy.