Haven by Kristi Cook

Haven by Kristi Cook

First in the Winterhaven series

3.5 stars

Violet McKenna has always had visions and no one ever listens to her warnings. Her father is a recent example of this case. After his death, she’s forced to choose between living with her stepmom in New York or with her grandma in Atlanta. She sees a brochure for a boarding school named Winterhaven and is immediately drawn to it. She decides to move to New York with her stepmom and attend Winterhaven. Once she’s there she meets Aiden Gray. A boy who she can’t help but feel she knows somehow. The school seems to be hiding just as many secrets as Aiden and she wants to know what’s being hidden. I don’t know why but I had been wanting to read this book ever since I had stumbled upon it on Amazon. The back of the jacket-flap summary sounded interesting enough and I thought I was in for an original story. I found this book at my library and put it right on the top so I could dive right in to it. This book is nothing special. I thought I would be reading about strange super powers and some big plot to take everyone down and a romance thrown in. Sadly this was not the case. Yes there were superpowers but they were hardly touched on and only mentioned every now and then throughout the novel. This book was really all about…vampires. That’s right vampires. Not once did the summary mention vampires and I call bullshit on that.

If you write a book about vampires then I think the jacket summary should at least hint about vampires. Maybe the writer thought it would be a suspense technique but all it did was annoy me and make say, “What? I thought this book was about special abilities, not vampires.” The writer was mediocre and it didn’t captivate me very much. Let’s talk about these characters. 

The main female character is Violet. Violet was nothing special and a pretty boring character. I read this book back in March and I can’t even remember a good quality about her. I probably should’ve wrote more about her in my old review but I guess even then she meant nothing to me. I have come to the conclusion that she is just boring.
 
Overall she’s a Mary Sue.

Kick-Butt Heroine Scale: 4.5

The main male character is Aiden. I think I’m spelling his name wrong. If I am sorry, but I just don’t have any fucks to give about him.


I mean he’s not a bad guy; he just wasn’t a well developed character. I like him well enough, but I don’t feel like I really learned anything about him other than the obvious things. That he likes science and some other stuff I don’t want to spoil for people that want to read this book.
 
Swoon Worthy Scale: 6
 
The Villain- I’m sure you could guess who it is so I won’t talk about it.

Villain Scale: 5


Violet’s friends are Kate, Cece, Sophie, and Marissa. I liked the girls and they each seemed different, but their friendship with Violet felt rushed. It felt like this when I was reading, “Oh look you have a new roommate and roommates always end up being friends and let’s make her friends your friends too.” The relationship also felt fake; there were times when it the friendships felt like they were just for show.


Character Scale: 6

I will give the author this though the ideas were quite original and new when it came to paranormal things we already heard about before. I will probably read the sequel. I hope to find a lot of improvements in it. I expect stronger writing, more character development, less predictability when it comes to villains, and to captivate me and make me rave. I’m curious to see where the story goes. Let’s hope it’s somewhere good.

Cover Thoughts: The cover looks pretty good on the computer; in fact I really like the cover on the computer. When I looked at the cover up close in real life, I thought it was ugly. The cover looks animated and just wrong. I mean it could’ve been a beautiful cover if the colors wouldn’t clash and it had the right kind of editing.