Where to start? Illuminated barely received two stars from me. The story was original and had a few elements of mystery but it fell seriously flat for me. I'm not sure what I expected from "Illuminated" but what I got were two teenagers who feel head over heels in love with each other within 4 days, an extremely rare book that became a "dangerous" mystery, and an introduction to the romance for Abelard and Heloise. The story moved swiftly but I felt everything was way to easy to be a real mystery or adventure (but I could be over thinking it). They had to trace the history and ownership of a book hundreds possibly thousands of years old, and they did that with no problem in about one week, maybe two. Really? The book must have changed hands a dozen times and they found every single person that had possession of the book at one time.I can see if they found maybe three of the owners over the course of the summer but to trace it all the way back to the beginning in two weeks tops? Um, no. You will not feed me that foolishness.Then enters a villain who's stent and presence was so fleeting in the book that I seriously have no info or need to mention him/her in this review, so moving on. August was the perfect dream boyfriend. Sweet, attentive, straight forward and gorgeous. But I felt nothing as I read about him. He had passion but and he wasn't completely there or perfect but he still wasn't a real enough person for me to care about. Callie was what you expect of a young woman who lost her mother as a child with a father who was never home. She had mommy issues she had daddy issues and above all else she was so innocent. Not necessarily bad traits in your main character but traits that I had seen done more times than one, but those traits didn't even begin to make Callie tangible. The only characters I loved were Uncle Gabe and Harry, they both loved Callie so much I could touch it and that is something that I seriously wish I could have seen in all of the characters. Emotion that felt real instead of just merely written. The toss in of Abelard and Heloise was sweet, and well placed and while for two minutes I wanted to go to Paris to see their graves it still wasn't enough to save this book for me. I'm not against insta-love or mystery but I just didn't feel that any of this was real, and that is always my goal with a book. To be taken to a new and exciting place away from our very real world.
