Enlightened by Billie Kowalewski

[Jax14]

Enlightened is a romantic fantasy for YA and is the first in a series.

Harmony is one of the souls in Artopia that is sent to Earth for their life lessons. She has a guide who takes care of her and is able to hear her thoughts and try to steer her through the process of education in life lessons. As the souls reach the end of the lesson, they are pulled back to Artopia where there is a full unpacking and sharing of learning. Harmony realises that if she concentrates hard enough on Earth, she has some memory of where she is from so is able to look for her classmates and possibly draw them together before they get pulled back. Her feelings for her classmate Kaleb, however, seem to run deeper than just a little liking. He has confessed his love to her and she is confused. Her last life on Earth, where she lost her boyfriend, was torture, and she nearly died of a broken heart. How is this linked to Kaleb and her feelings on Earth and Artopia for him? Surely it should not be this intense?

The blurb that was offered told of a number of lives that ended accidentally but all belonged to one person, which intrigued me. As I began the book, the author states in her dedication that she will see her father after school. In hindsight I understand it, but in the beginning, it made me think that the author was a young girl/teenager and the style of the first couple of pages reinforced this. I was shocked when I realised she was an adult as the writing is very fluffy and on a very high emotional level with lots of exclamation points strewn all over. I hate bashing peoples’ works, but I think that’s the beauty of being a reviewer – there is something for everyone, and this was just not for me.

You have a soul who has life lessons on Earth. So many questions. Right then, does that mean that all people on Earth are souls? If so, why bother to go at all? If not, why Earth? When do the lessons end? Why do they not occur in Earth’s timeline sequence? What happens if their lessons cause a butterfly effect? What happens to the people on Earth once an accidental death has taken place? How do they recover? The barrier between worlds prevents them from remembering who they are, but this would mean that they would not be able to incorporate it into the next mission to Earth as they would not remember it from Artopia. It would also mean that what was about to happen on Earth must have been preknown by the guides or they are just sent there randomly? What if they learn the same lesson over and over? The whole concept of the story didn’t make sense once you looked deeper into it, and to get to the concept took a long time. The beginning of the story was very confusing and I nearly put it aside quite a few times, but felt I owed the author a full review so slogged on.

Once Harmony realises that she and Kaleb are meant to be soul mates the style of writing becomes OTT. Over the space of a few pages she mentions running her hands through his silky sandy-blonde hair a fair number of times and he touches her long brown curls over and over again. The repetition was beginning to drive me nuts. Also his honey-scent and her floral scent and them breathing it in and going “ahhh” gets repeated over and over. Now I’m all for a good YA love story, but when the characters are teenagers and the story has them tied into soul mates and they feel that their love is so intense that they cannot live without each other and feel empty enough to kill themselves, then warning bells start ringing. To advocate that a person’s validation only comes from the love of another is a dangerous message to send out. In fact Edward and Bella from Twilight spring to mind.

It’s unfortunate that so many negatives stuck in my mind with this book instead of the positives that I’m sure were there. Well done to the author for taking on the idea, but the book just did not resonate with me and the (obvious) cliffhanger that ended it, reinforced the fact that I would not read the next in the series. I really hope there are others out there that will connect on a better level with the book than I did. On the plus side, the grammar and spelling were well taken care of.

Thank you to Voracious Readers Only and the author for the opportunity to review the book.

[Dragonsend]

You didn't specify what if any kind of life lessons were discussed but I understand that the author maybe spent to much time on the budding romance and not enough on firming up the plot. Thank you for your review.

[Sydney Lee]

Thanks for the review! I don't really like when the romance is too heavy that it overwhelms everything else, so this might not be the book for me. So thanks for the warning! XD

[Nisha Ward]

Ouch. There's nothing wrong with romance in YA but this sounds like there was too much of it and not enough worldbuilding. The concept can work, but I think it needs a much more solid foundation to be built upon first.