I received this book for free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Seeker by Arwen Elys Dayton
Series: Seeker #1
on February 12, 2015
Genres: Children's, Fantasy, Fiction, Romance, Science Fiction, Young Adult
Pages: 448
Format: E-Arc
Source: Netgalley
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The night Quin Kincaid takes her Oath, she will become what she has trained to be her entire life. She will become a Seeker. This is her legacy, and it is an honor.
As a Seeker, Quin will fight beside her two closest companions, Shinobu and John, to protect the weak and the wronged. Together they will stand for light in a shadowy world.
And she’ll be with the boy she loves–who’s also her best friend. But the night Quin takes her Oath, everything changes.
Being a Seeker is not what she thought. Her family is not what she thought. Even the boy she loves is not who she thought. And now it’s too late to walk away.

I couldn’t decide if I really liked Seeker or really hated it. There were times when we got on and I thought that it was going great, only for everything to come crashing down.

Why the inability to make a simple decision? Perhaps because the flow of the plot was a bit disjointed. I mean we start in the present, and then we end up somewhere in the past. Which is told from several character’s perspectives only to flung into the future with the rest of the story being told a year and a half after wherever we left off. It is no wonder I am confused. I spent a while certain that I had managed to skip some pages despite evidence to the contrary.

Also I was left with the question of what actually was a seeker? What do they do? Who are? And how did they come about? Are they a secret group of people? Are they good? Or are they bad? Whatever it is that actually defines a seeker and makes them sound awesome didn’t really happen. I was left confused and unsure who was the baddie of the story, who were the heroes and why were people changing personalities?  These questions should have been simply answered but it is amazing that it took me this long to figure it out.

And then there is the characters – Quin, John, Shinobu and Maud. Quin and John seem to be the main characters. John spends the majority of his time chasing Quin, saying he loves and urging people not to hurt her, while managing to hurt her, he is also obsessed with a weird dagger thing. It was weird and were we meant to sympathise or hate him? I’m sure. With Quin I wasn’t sure want she wanting, why she was fighting for. She felt a little fake, there for a certain role.

I liked Shinobu, he was someone I could sympathise with and his back-story made everything about his character make sense. But he was developed too late and by the time I could get to know him, the book was basically over. Which was a pity because he was doing really well to fix this story.

Then there was Maud. At first she seemed like a secondary character but then she becomes more involved, more integral with the story. But again her full appearance and backstory appeared to late, and seemed to be more of an afterthought than a key point. I did think that she could be an integral part of the story but the more I thought about the more I realised that I was not sure what her role was. She appears to be a guardian of something but what she really is guarding remains a mystery.

I wanted this book to be good, hell I was forever hopeful throughout that something would change, click with me and all the confusion and questions would disappear. That, unfortunately did not happen.

I not even sure that I could give the sequel a chance to make up for the issues in this book. At the end of this book I was left unsure about my feelings. But after much consideration I decided that there were downs than ups. More things that I could moan about than think positively about. The should have been a great story instead it left me wanting…

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