"Defiance" by Lili St. Crow

From Goodreads: "The heart-stopping fourth novel in New York Times bestselling author Lili St. Crow's Strange Angels series.

Now that sixteen-year-old Dru's worst fears have come true and Sergej has kidnapped her best friend Graves, she'll have to go on a suicidal rescue mission to bring him back in one piece.
That is, if she can put all of Christophe's training to good use, defeat her mother's traitor, Anna, once and for all, and manage to survive another day..."

I am pretty sure that I started my review of the last book in Lili St' Crow's "Strange Angels" series, "Jealousy", by proclaiming it as "sheer fantabulousness". Well this fourth installment of the series? I declare it to be infinite fantabulousness! I didn't think that it would be possible for me to love this series, especially its characters, anymore than I already did and I was totally wrong. This book exceeded any expectations that I had tenfold and I do believe it to be the best book I have read this year, if not as well as last year (yeah, it totally blew "City of Fallen Angels" out of the water, and I am sure that we all know by now that I pretty much worship Cassie Clare and her "Mortal Instruments" series). In fact I loved it so much that as soon as I finished it I started it all over again!

One of my biggest pet peeves in YA paranormal books is when the female character is introduced to the "Real World" (the world of all of the paranormal creep crawlies) by the male character and then the male character proceeds to tell her to stay away from said world because essentially she is unknowledgeable about it and all of its dangers. However, the female character believes herself to be the expert in said world and then decides to do lots of things behind the male characters back in this world and ends up in a whole slew of trouble that she could have avoided if she had just listened to the boy. So I seriously rejoice Lili's writing and story weaving because I do not find myself experiencing this with her books (yes you could argue that Dru knew about the Real World prior to meeting Christophe, but that would be a stretch, as we have seen, she only knew a mere fraction of it, Chris introduced her to the entire svetocha world, and she didn't do what so many of these dumb heroines did, putting herself into unnecessarily dangerous situations- she put herself into necessary dangerous situations, situations where she was pretty much the only one who cared about the outcome because everyone else was too concerned with keeping their lies that they fed her in order).

Usually in my eyes there is a clear-cut winner as to what male the female character should end up with (the new mysterious boy rather than her best friend), but in this series I am so gosh darn conflicted (not that the girl has to end up with the boy, as per what Lili said in my interview with her last month last month, but that just seems to be how everything goes down in YA), I seriously do not know who I want her to end up with. Christophe or Graves? Christophe, who has made her the fighter that she is today and who truly hasn't lied to her (even though she thinks he has) or Graves, who she dragged out of the human world, shoving him into the Real World and who doesn't blame her one bit for doing so? Seriously, how is a girl to choose?

I said in my review of "Jealousy" that it gave us the most answers than any of the previous books in the series, but this book gave us even more sought after answers and for that I am grateful, no more sitting there and pondering for hours after reading the book about how things are going to turn out! The only downfall about this book is that one character who I expressed my love for in my review of "Jealousy" ended up hurting my heart a lot, but another character, who I was so intrigued by in the earlier books, really managed to put that broken heart back together with his somewhat goofy (though at the same time menacing) grin and random outbursts of "BANG!"

Rating: 11/10 (yep, you saw that right, 11/10)