ARC Review--Lailah by Nikki Kelly

Over one million Wattpad readers have made Lailah a sensation!

The girl knows she’s different. She doesn’t age. She has no family. She has visions of a past life, but no clear clues as to what she is, or where she comes from. But there is a face in her dreams – a light that breaks through the darkness. She knows his name is Gabriel.

On her way home from work, the girl encounters an injured stranger whose name is Jonah. Soon, she will understand that Jonah belongs to a generation of Vampires that serve even darker forces. Jonah and the few like him, are fighting with help from an unlikely Allie – a rogue Angel, named Gabriel.

In the crossfire between good and evil, love and hate, and life and death, the girl learns her name: Lailah. But when the lines between black and white begin to blur, where in the spectrum will she find her place? And with whom?

Gabriel and Jonah both want to protect her. But Lailah will have to fight her own battle to find out who she truly is.

I received this ARC for review from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. I was in no way compensated for this review.


Nikki Kelly's debut Lailah has seen a lot of talk around the blogosphere. And it has an intriguing storyline as well, but at the same time, I found that I could never fully get into it as I had hoped.

There's basically a lot of unknown about Lailah who currently goes by Cessie. She doesn't know much of her history, only that she's doesn't age and has died a few times only to wake back up. She has to move around a lot for she's forever seventeen and it basically makes life difficult. Shockingly enough, this entire story is set outside of the US, which most books I've read always tend to be here, so it was a nice change of pace to be somewhere else in a read!

Lailah's (as I will refer to her for the course of the review, though she is still referred to as Cessie for a large portion) life changes from the moment she finds an injured Jonah outside her current place of work. She knows he's a vampire and he's hurt and for whatever reason she decides to help him. A group of vampires were after him and when they catch up to the pair, they soon turn their sights on Lailah. And it's not long before she meets Jonah's friends which include Gabriel, an Angel she feels an immediate connection to.

This is where things got confusing for me. She already seemed to know Gabriel before meeting him. Like she actually had some memories about him and when the two are actually face to face, it's like there was never any time lost between them. It was so weird, I felt like I was missing something. And we were in a sense. Lailah gradually remembers things from a long time past, but the memories are slow going and they sometimes popped up at odd moments and I kind of missed the transition between present time and memory time. So it basically provided a lot of stumbling around for me.

Then there's Jonah and you can practically smell the love triangle before it's fully into play. Jonah becomes "intrigued" with Lailah from the getgo, but are you ready for clincher? It seems BOTH Jonah and Gabriel have female vampires in love with them and neither one likes how much time Lailah spends with each. Yeah, because a basic love triangle wasn't enough. And it's hard to know how serious the guy is about either Lailah or the girl vampire because they act so contradicting about it all. Needless to say the romance left me wanting to see some actual romance. Granted, we did have a few moments between Lailah and the guys that were swoonworthy, but I hate indecision, I just wanted Lailah to choose someone from the getgo.

And if that weren't enough, someone from Lailah's past has come back. There is a very big mystery/secret surrounding Lailah and she is naturally at the center of it all. The mystery itself was a tad confusing for me as well. I kind of got it, but at the same time I was left wondering quite a few things about it too.

The pacing was rather good though. There was never a dull moment, it's just that a lot of those moments build into some confusion for me. Lailah is definitely a rarity, but the explanations that come aren't very easy to grasp. Overall it was a so-so read for me. It had its moments where I did enjoy what was happening, but they were usually coupled with more questions and confusion.


Overall Rating 2.5/5 stars


Lailah releases October 7, 2014