Sleight

Sleight (AVRA-K #1)
Jennifer Sommersby
320 pages
Publisher: the author
Source: Books With Bite Book Tours
★★★★☆

You can read the Goodreads summary here.

What a great read!  It's so different from all the other YA saturated on the market, but at the same time it is equally enjoyable.

Gemma has lived the with circus since she was a child, but since her mother passed away there have been some changes.  The circus is staying in one spot longer, they have a new wealthy financier, and Gemma and the other circus kids are being forced to attend public school.  There she meets Henry, the financiers son; they fall in love and discover they are heirs to a 3000 year old tradition of the AVRAKEDAVRA.  Soon they are on a page-turning, edge of the seat-sitting journey to keep the text in the right hands.

So what made this book so great?  There was a lot of action and romance.  The setting of the circus was new and different for me and I loved it.  I also loved the characters.  Even the plethora of circus characters, they all had backgrounds and depth and that made the unique.  Not to mention the plot, which made this book amazing - it had everything!  Ghosts, mystery, magic, an ancient tradition about to fall into the hands of evil...

Of course there was a cliffhanger, so I will be keeping my eyes out for the sequel.  Like I said, this book is different from the other YA on the market, which seems to be undergoing some paranormal kick.  While this book was refreshing, if you really love that paranormal aspect, you can still find it in Sleight, just done in a new way.

In her Acknowledgments at the end of the book, Jennifer Sommersby talks about how hard it is to get published and how independent publishing wasn't how she pictured this book.  I don't understand why all these publishers passed on such a great YA novel, but it's their loss now.  I hope this book tour will get this book onto more TBR piles!

Thanks so much to Savannah from Books With Bite for providing me the opportunity to read and review this book.  If you found my blog via her site, please follow me on Google Friend Connect so you can catch all my reviews.