Struck (Struck #1)by Jennifer Bosworth
Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux BYR
Won from Claire
373 pages
"Mia Price is a lightning addict. She’s survived countless strikes, but her craving to connect to the energy in storms endangers her life and the lives of those around her.
Los Angeles, where lightning rarely strikes, is one of the few places Mia feels safe from her addiction. But when an earthquake devastates the city, her haven is transformed into a minefield of chaos and danger. The beaches become massive tent cities. Downtown is a crumbling wasteland, where a traveling party moves to a different empty building each night, the revelers drawn to the destruction by a force they cannot deny. Two warring cults rise to power, and both see Mia as the key to their opposing doomsday prophecies. They believe she has a connection to the freak electrical storm that caused the quake, and to the far more devastating storm that is yet to come.
Mia wants to trust the enigmatic and alluring Jeremy when he promises to protect her, but she fears he isn’t who he claims to be. In the end, the passion and power that brought them together could be their downfall. When the final disaster strikes, Mia must risk unleashing the full horror of her strength to save the people she loves, or lose everything." - Goodreads
Struck is a powerful read and truly lives up to the cover: one of chaos and destruction. Two opposing groups battle over a girl with an ability to contain electrical charge aka a human lightening rod while the world of LA is thrown into upheavel by earthquakes. Sounds epic right?
To an extent Struck delivered on the premise. And it was epic. Mia was a strong character, she handled what came and was always looking out for her family. Be it Parker, her little brother, or her mother, who was battling PTSD. I really valued that in her, yet I found her lacking one specific quality that would have allowed me to connect more with her: sensibilness. A lot could have been avoided if she would have communicated more. She also has a way of looking over certain facts. For example, with Jeremy - Mia, he tried to kill you. Yet you're going to trust him. Really? Jeremy's character did not cut it for me. It was just so cliche: hot mysterious boy shows up, is keenly interested in main female character to the point of obsessiveness, is constantly disappearing and does not tell MC what is going on. Sigh. I did not understand their relationship. There was character development in the other characters though. One of the characters that has stuck in my mind is of Prophet. He is the leader of the Followers. Prophet definitely chilled me to my bones.
The plot was unique. I'll give Ms. Bosworth that. An earthquake caused by lightening? Never heard of that before. Is it possible? Probably not but it makes for a good set up. Not only that, she creates two cults: the Seekers and the Followers. Although this made me roll my eyes, it did provide some interesting reading. The neatest idea is that of a girl being able to be struck over and over again by lightening and being able to hold the charge. I thought that was awesome. I was a little disappointed that she only got struck once in the book.. it tells of past times that Mia was struck but in the present it only happens once. Struck is packed full, brimming with information. Sometimes it was hard to keep up with everything but it kept me reading. The writing style was easy to follow and the characters had a nice voice to them.
Overall, I would recommend Struck to those who enjoy end-of-the-world books, romance (the base-less kind though), strong female characters, and of course lightening.
Excerpt
When you've been struck by lightening as many times as I have, you start to expect the worst pretty much all the time. You never know when that jagged scrawl of white fire, charged with a hundred million volts of electricity, might blaze down from the sky and find its mark on you; sear a hole like a bullet right through you, or turn your hair to ash; maybe leave your skin blackened to a crisp, or stop your heart; make you blind, or deaf, or both.
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Any of that could happen, or none of it, or something no one's ever heard of. The thing about lightening is you never know what it's going to do to you.
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My name is Mia Price, and I am a human lightening rod. Do they make a support group for that? They should, and let me tell you why.
My name is Mia Price, and I am a lightening addict.
There. Now you know the truth.
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