The Glass Wall by Madison Adler/Carmen Caine

For some reason, I neglected to review a number of ebooks that I downloaded for free from Amazon, right after I read them. I’m trying to remedy that now.

Superficially, this book, Beyond the Glass Wall (The Glass Wall), book one in a series of YA urban fantasy books, sounds like any recent YA fantasy book. If I’d read the blurb I probably wouldn’t have bothered reading it. But my list of Kindle freebies is so long and from my view on my Kindle I can’t see what the book is about, just the title. So I did start reading it and I quickly realized that I liked it.

The books starts with the main character, 17-year-old Sydney, moving in with a new foster family. She’s been through this a lot so she’s not all that bothered. However, the family she comes to is very nice and she slowly finds herself warming up to them. Almost right away, she spots a very good-looking guy moving into a house nearby. Sydney soon finds out that he’s far more than just a handsome stranger.

It appears Rafael, the new guy, has superhuman powers, which leads Sydney to suspect he might be some sort of alien, which isn’t quite the case. It takes Sydney a long time to find out exactly what he is. In the meantime, she also meets another extremely handsome guy, Jareth, who is a rock star. He has a mysterious connection to Rafael, though not really a friendly one.

I can’t seem to give this book justice. It still sounds like a cliche. Just take my word for it, this one is really good. I finished it in just a few days, because I wanted to know more about Rafael and Jareth.

I suppose partly it’s because it’s so easy to see everything through Sydney’s eyes. I liked the way she slowly realized that her foster family was different from earlier ones, who she liked, but never felt completely connected to. Right from the start the parents treat her as their own child. Their daughter takes a little longer to connect with Sydney, but she too, comes to view her as a close family member. This book is the first in a series of four. There’s also a prequel, Behind the Mirror, a short story, that is available for free download on Amazon.