The Summer Marked by Rebekah L Purdy

Published: September 22nd, 2015

Publisher: Entangled Teen

Pages: 304

Copy: From Publisher

Summary: Goodreads

The sequel to the chilling Winter People returns to the world of Faerie, and is a romantic and enchanting follow-up.

Salome left humankind behind to be with her boyfriend, Gareth, in the Kingdom of Summer. But now forces of darkness are rising. Her happily-ever-after is coming apart, and the Kingdom is on the brink of war. 

Newly-single Kadie Byers is on her way home for Thanksgiving, imagining a visit filled with hot chocolate, a hot guy for a little rebound action, and some girl time with her bestie, Salome. Except she receives a message from Salome with two important words: PLEASE HURRY.

When Kadie rushes to help Salome, she’s ripped from the human world and pulled into the kingdoms of Faerie, where she's shocked to learn that Salome's monsters are real, and that she's now at the mercy of one extremely vengeful Winter Queen... 

Now both Salome and Kadie must find a way to survive the deadly chaos...or lose themselves to Winter's deadly, icy grasp

My thoughts:

I have to say that I am very conflicted about 'The Summer Marked".  I enjoyed 'The Winter People', although I can't find my review of it, and I was looking forward to the continuation of Salome's story.  And I must be honest, I loved the story.  I also liked the characters, several of them quite a lot in fact - Etienne being an example -  but what I really didn't like was the 'voice' of the characters, or their language if you prefer. It was a bit like nails on a chalkboard after a while.  I just couldn't picture centuries old fae saying things like 'Wow, that's cool', ' Thanks a lot', 'yeah' or 'listen'. I almost gave up at one point and dnf'd, but I decided that the plot deserved my perseverance.

Now after much introspection I have come to realize that this is a purely personal thing.  I am not, nor have been for many years, a young adult, and this is very definitely a young adult book.  I am also certain that no young adults reading this book will have any problem whatsoever with the language, but unfortunately for me, it really took the shine off an excellent story.  I found myself re-writing dialogue in my head as I was reading it.  I'm not sure what that say's about me exactly!

So, the story... great story.  Lots going on, and for the most part the pace kept up - just a couple of slower sections, but they didn't last too long.  It was nice to see Kadie's adventures, which were decidedly gruesome, and it was interesting to see how terribly she was manipulated by Griselle.  I'm really interested to see what happens there in the final part of the trilogy.  We are finding out more and more about Salome and her mysterious background and powers and things are getting very complex where she is concerned.  I loved her interactions with Darach, not to mention Gareth and Nevin and the situation is becoming increasing fraught. 

There is a lot going on, and 'The Summer Marked' very nicely set everything up for a final showdown with Winter.  In a nutshell, I enjoyed 'The Summer Marked' and I will definitely read the sequel, but ........