 Hello, I'm back in my bed right now. I might switch back and forth between this and the green screen because I Don't really always know what to put on there and today. I have no idea what to do there But today I want to talk about obsidian Which I'm probably going to put this video somewhere like in the middle of the schedule I'm not just gonna have it released on Friday like a month from now because I Don't know I just I just wanted to throw this in the middle of something not make it that big a deal because this is one of the many Many twilight clones that I bought a couple of years ago like remember I had that giant pile of angel Romance young adult novels and this one I also threw in there just because this one is basically just twilight But with aliens instead and I bought it specifically because it looked Hilariously bad like the idea of this genre with aliens just sounds just so stupid that I would have a blast reading through it and making fun of it and Honestly, I would say that overall it is okay, you know, it's it's an okay story I would put it slightly below hush hush now if you've seen my review of hush hush Which you should don't link to it then you would know that that series I didn't think was great But I thought it was decent overall because there were parts of it that I genuinely Enjoyed like no joke no bullshit. I genuinely liked some parts of it I liked a lot of the story beats outside of the romance stuff. I thought that was good I liked the main character because she has an actual personality and Well, there are a few other smaller things but you should watch my review if you want more info on that and obsidian is kind of the same there's a few things I like a few things I dislike and Overall, I don't know. I just thought it was okay. I didn't read the whole series I only read this first book and I'm just gonna go over it not an exhaustive detail But in some detail so there will be spoilers if that bothers you Check out now. Let's get started. This is the introduction song. It's not very good, but it's not too long So at the start of this one the main character whose name is Katie Although sometimes they also call her cat. So whichever one of those you prefer She moves to a small town in West Virginia, which is here After her father's death and it's a couple of years after her father's death But her and her mom just needed a fresh start so they've moved in and it literally starts with them unpacking boxes and everything And then she needs to head to the grocery store. So she goes to her next-door neighbor who happens to be Damon black It's a ridiculous name. By the way, he's the honky love interest on the cover here and Actually as an aside, I like the other covers that I've seen online of this better I I don't prefer this one that I've got but anyways She goes to see Damon black and she tries asking him for directions and the whole time She's thinking about how unfathomably sexy he is cuz he answers the door with his shirt off and he's got deep green eyes and yada yada and She thinks he's hot, but he's also just a dick to her, you know, he's rude to her while She's asking him directions. He talks about how she looks like a little kid and She's just upset by this and eventually he does give her directions, but she winds up leaving in tears Now the thing is Damon is an ass to her here, but it's nothing too crazy or too over the top he's just rude to her and This is not uncommon in the romance genre by any means whether we're talking adults or young adults like the two It mainly love interests just don't like each other at the beginning and a good way to do that It's just to make the the man an ass to the woman I don't know why that became such a thing but it did become a thing and the positive part to this is that Because he's not too crazy over the top with being a terrible person, you know, he's not stalking her or Watching her while she sleeps or anything Untoward like that. It's a little bit more believable that they would get along later You know, it's more believable that they could get over this first impression and go on to like each other So some of the later things that happen in this book are just more believable and I did like that on the minus side He's not really being that terrible to her But the book still treats it like he's being that terrible to her because you know again Katie leaves in tears and So this just makes her look a little bit whiny, you know, it's not like he hits on any specific Insecurities or anything that she has it's just he's rude to her and says she looks like a little kid And I don't know if it went forward and it mentioned that she hates looking so young for one reason or another then Sure, I guess this would be more understandable, but that doesn't really come up and also He never stops being an ass to her which is also a downside here So it it's just it's just odd, you know, you'd think he would be at least a little bit nicer And there's a few moments where he's nicer certainly But overall he is still just a rude person and an unpleasant person to be around so and That really contributes to their just their lack of chemistry Which I'll go into a little bit more as this goes on, but they just they have very little so while Katie's at the store She runs into Dee who happens to be Damon's sister and the two of them actually strike up a friendship because For whatever reason the first person you meet in a new town has to be come your best friend I don't know why that's a thing, but it is a thing and they start Gardening together, which I was actually I was genuinely taken aback by that because apparently Katie has an actual hobby You know, that's something that makes her seem like an actual person and not a total blank slate She likes to garden and her new house doesn't have one so she creates one and it's it's great It's cool and her other big hobby that this book talks about is I'm not making this up She reviews books on the internet that is I'm not gonna lie. I laughed when I read that it was is pretty funny that She also does basically what I do and there is one moment later on in the book where Damon finds out about it and he asked Katie to see some of her stuff and She is reluctant to show him and I just felt very seen What does it look like? I hissed a slow smile crept over his face. You film yourself I took a deep and slow breath. You make it sound like I'm doing a live perp show or something Damon made a sound in the back of his throat. Is that what you're doing? That was a stupid question Can I please close it now? I want to watch it. No The idea of him watching me geek out of the books I bought in the last week horrified me There was no way he'd understand. Yeah, I feel I feel very seen But at the same time I feel very attacked So some more stuff happens Damon continues just being rude to her and trying to push her away and she's not sure why she thinks he's just kind of a mean person or whatever and Later on he winds up saving her from a bear attack and she doesn't understand what happens there She just kind of sees this flash of light and then passes out for a while and she Doesn't remember what happened, but Damon just tells her yeah We scared off the bear, but you passed out from fear. So I carried you back home and there's also a few other small things Which she sees which don't seem possible like she sees these hands look sort of see-through transparent at a few points and she's a very freaked out and This is something that I kind of liked because she has an actual reason to fear that she's hallucinating and to fear that She's going crazy because her father died of brain cancer and before he died The tumors in his brain caused him to hallucinate stuff and so she has actual reason to be afraid here that is Very very good That's a very neat detail to put in and it could actually make the character feel a little more real But at the same time They mentioned it literally once and it never comes up again. So if they had Had her actually Investigate Damon and Dee a little bit more to try and figure out what's going on with them to try and prove to herself That she's not crazy and she's not seeing things then I think that would have worked really well And I know that that's just such a standard part of this genre in particular that I'm kind of glad the author skipped over a bunch of it, but at the same time Like you had an opportunity to do something kind of neat there and you didn't so eventually like more than a hundred pages in Katie is saved by a man who attacks her at night and he's like asking about Damon and Dee and she doesn't know what's going on and eventually Damon saves her and Long story short it turns out that they're both aliens His and apparently when he first saved her from the bear his power kind of left a trace on her Which allowed other aliens to track her down you see Damon and Dee as well as a bunch of other people that live in this area are Aliens and they're from a planet called Luxon and they call themselves Lux and they are beings of pure light, which I don't know how that makes sense But they can move faster than the speed of light Somehow and they can take on human form somehow and then they can also do stuff like stop time or pass through solid objects somehow it really doesn't make that much sense when you think about it and the villains are these aliens called the Aram who are beings of like darkness, you know, they they like to suck out to the powers of the Lux and they I don't know they can't come out during the daytime because it'll kill them and Damon fights a bunch of the Aram because he's one of the strongest Lux apparently and you know all of the Lux fight Aram But Damon in particular fights them. So in other words, he is Damon and he's the fighter of the night men I am not making any of this up. That is 100% true and I don't know if that was done on purpose or on accident But either way it's extremely funny to me Now from this point forward, it's pretty much what you would expect from this type of story Damon and Katie grow closer some Aram up here And Damon has to protect Katie from them In fact, like he heals her a bunch at one point and it comes up that hey You're gonna have this trace on you for a while So you got to stick by my side for a while and I figured that would be the rest of the book But no, it's only a couple of pages and they mentioned yeah a few weeks past And then it's just over and then other stuff happens, which is a little weird and then they you know fight some more Katie goes to prom with a different dude her prom date tries to sexually assault her Damon saves her again Which makes Katie seem a little bit too much like a damsel in distress for my taste which is annoying But at the same time she does wind up killing one of the Aram later on like apparently obsidian will kill them So she stabs one with an obsidian knife and it kills him. It's not the climax, but it's close to it so she's not as pathetic and useless as you might think and You know, it's pretty much what you would expect. This is a self-contained book Like I know that there's a bunch of sequels and spin-offs like I think it's five books in the main series And then there's one prequel about Damon's brother and then there's Two or three spin-offs which are from Damon's point of view So It's nice that this first one is self-contained and I don't feel locked into reading all this other stuff And I just want to go over some more more of the positives here real quick So positives Damon and Katie don't confess their love at all in this book You know, like you would expect them to like know each other for less than a week and then they're like, I love you I would die for you. I would do anything for you. You are the light of my life You know, that's sort of crap But but they don't in this book at all like even by the end they really like each other and they've grown much closer and they do have a bond there but They they don't say that they're in love and even better This book takes place over the course of months not like two weeks or something the way a lot of others in this genre do for whatever reason Like it starts off in the summertime and by the end it's November at some point So it is much more believable and much more realistic that people could form a bond like that over time and Hell they aren't even together every waking moment of this book, you know Like Katie spends a lot of time with other people that she meets in this new town and she spends time with D And she spends time with her mom and so it's nice that it's not just the Damon and Katie show the entire time even though they are the two leads The lore surrounding the Lux and their planet Luxon is kind of neat like we don't get that much detail about them, but we find out that apparently their planet is 23 billion light years away and keep in mind our observable universe is only 13 billion light years Away from us that we can see so they're 10 billion light years beyond that So they're just so far away from us that it it feels crazy And I did kind of like that and I feel like Maybe the later books will go more into that and that'd be kind of interesting In fact, that's something that this has in common with Pashash It has a lot of things in common with it but one of the main things being that the lore is kind of interesting and It's a lot better than just saying like hey vampires exist here or something like that which a lot of Just a lot of fantasy, especially urban fantasy tends to do so I Just I like that, you know, they didn't go super far with it. It's not amazing lore But they went they put in a little bit of effort. So I enjoyed that And it also makes sense for the aliens to be a secret here Because we find out that the government actually knows about them and is watching them But they aren't really doing anything beyond that and the aliens are essentially refugees from their home planet and Even though they're extremely powerful and they seem like they could maybe take over the earth that they really tried Which does kind of annoy me like I feel if you're gonna do aliens Then don't give them all these crazy powers if you want all these crazy powers Just do some sort of supernatural creature if you want aliens just have them have advanced technology and leave it at that But whatever that's just me But it actually makes sense why they would want to stay quiet and keep a low profile because they're just They're just here after their last home was destroyed and they're just trying to live their lives You know, they aren't trying to take over. They aren't trying to suck blood out of humans or anything like that. So it's one of the few urban fantasy novels I've ever come across where it actually makes sense for the Fantasy or sci-fi elements to stay a secret and I liked that And I did like how Damon actually has kind of a reason for being rude and trying to push Katie away See specifically He had a brother named Dawson. So they were Damon D and Dawson because apparently Luxe children are always born in threes and we meet one or two other pairs of Luxe children or not pairs of sets of Luxe children They're all they're all triplets and their names always start with the same letter for some reason, which whatever but anyways point is Dawson Actually also had a human girlfriend at one point But being around her too much left traces on her, you know And so the Aram wound up finding them and coming after them and both Dawson and his girlfriend were killed and Like I said, there's a prequel novel about that I don't know if it's any good or not, but it does at least give a reason for Damon to Want to stay away from Katie even though he does really like her I also liked just this one scene near the end of the book where In order to get rid of the trace they figure That Damon and Katie could just have sex and that would get rid of it and they don't wind up having sex They just they just come very close. We're not gonna go into too much detail about that But they come very close to it and it actually does work It does he winds up absorbing some of the trace energy that he left on her But it also sends out a bunch of energy, which just breaks all the light bulbs in Katie's house, which I Just thought that was a funny scene and it was clearly meant to be funny So hey, just there are good things about this book But now let's go into the positives for or let's go into the negatives for a minute So the biggest thing that drags this book down is just that Katie has no personality whatsoever Which is more or less what I expect from this genre But at the same time it felt almost like she was going to have it at the beginning because it mentioned Hey, I have multiple hobbies and hey, I kind of miss my dad and like okay They might have something in there But then I look back on this book which I only finished a couple of days ago And I try to think of anything about her that I remember that stands out that is well-defined and I Can't think of anything You know, I read hush hush Over a year ago and I still remember stuff about the main character Nora You know, I remember that She misses her dad so much that she's not willing to tell her mom about all of the crazy Supernatural stuff she's seeing because her mom will get freaked out and they're gonna wind up having to move and she will lose The last connection to her dad that she has which is the house they live in like I remember that I remember she becomes Kind of addicted to evil magic in the last book and that makes her do some Unpleasant things to her friends and I remember that like I remember a couple of things about her even if she's not the most amazing protagonist ever written but Katie I just I straight up don't know anything about this girl The villains and my villains. I mean the Aram have no personality no dimension and no motivation whatsoever They are just the evil shadow creatures who come out and want to kill the main characters just for existing You know, and there's a little bit near the end Which the last Aram they fight is pissed at Katie because remember I said she killed one earlier And that was apparently his brother. So there's a little bit there, but we spend like 10 pages on that entire Plot point. So it doesn't it doesn't really mean that much the the villains just Aren't they're not villains. They're just a thing that exists Katie and Damon like I mentioned earlier Just have no or no chemistry whatsoever And this is probably the biggest issue with this book as a whole because if you're gonna focus on romance this much You need these two people to have chemistry and they need to really feel like Yeah, they're into each other and it just doesn't seem that way because like I said Damon is just really rude to her He's just an ass and he never really stops being that, you know He he calls her kitten at the beginning as like an insult and then he continues using it as a pet name for her throughout which is just odd to begin with but also extremely condescending and just I Don't know it doesn't really make sense why she would be into him other than that He's hot and I will say he has a little bit of personality like I've mentioned, but It just doesn't really feel like the two of them would click together that much and this is probably largely because Katie is such a blank slate, but Who knows it's just it's just a big issue and overall Like I said, the series is just okay, you know It's not great or amazing, but there's parts of it. I genuinely liked and it never really Stuck with me because there's parts that are really stupid and drag the whole thing down So like I said, it's slightly below hush hush and because there's just no Really hilariously bad stuff here and it's not bad in any ways that are like just interesting to look at and pick apart I just don't feel like reading the rest of the series You know, like I said, there's four more books of this and then possibly reading the spin-offs. That's a It's just a bit of a time commitment, you know and I don't really feel like doing a deep dive into either this book or the others because There just wouldn't be all that much to critique about it. You know, there wouldn't be that much to say so Overall, I guess if you are looking for something in this genre if you're looking for a young adult supernatural romance Or just young adult romance in general. I Feel like there's better examples than this but at this there's not a lot of better examples So I I guess there's basically just hush hush if you're looking for something's but this specific But it wouldn't be a total waste of your time to read this one, you know Like I know the author Jennifer L. Armentrout has written other stuff Like I've seen some of her other stuff on Goodreads and such and I haven't read any further books So I can't say for certain if she's a great author, but This one does feel like it was either written by someone who's not a very good writer But they poured their heart and soul into every word or it's written by someone who is a pretty good writer But they just got lazy with it and I'm not sure which one it is like it could very well be either one But or maybe neither. I don't know. I I'm Not basing this on a whole lot of evidence. It just comes across that way to me So I don't know maybe the rest of the obsidian series is great. Maybe it's terrible I don't feel like reading it. Could you convince me to read it as in if this video gets a shitload of views? Would I be willing to go out and read some more of this? Probably that's That's about it. So I'll see you later. 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