Review--Shattered Souls by Mary Lindsey

A thrilling debut story of death, love, destiny, and danger

Lenzi hears voices and has visions - gravestones, floods, a boy with steel gray eyes. Her boyfriend, Zak, can't help, and everything keeps getting louder and more intense. Then Lenzi meets Alden, the boy from her dreams, who reveals that she's a reincarnated Speaker - someone who can talk to and help lost souls - and that he has been her Protector for centuries.

Now Lenzi must choose between her life with Zak and the life she is destined to lead with Alden. But time is running out: a malevolent spirit is out to destroy Lenzi, and he will kill her if she doesn't make a decision soon.

Having read and loved Mary Lindsey’s Haven earlier this year, I decided to take a look at her backlist and found the Souls duology and thought it sounded right up my alley. Shattered Souls was quite a unique read, it dealt with past lives and reincarnation, ghosts—both good and bad, and about the talented folks who help these ghosts move on in one way or another.

Enter Lenzi, a seventeen year old girl who thinks she’s going crazy like her father did. She’s been hearing voices more and more lately and it’s driving her past the brink of sanity. Her boyfriend, Zak tries to help and comfort her, but nothing will make the voices stop. Then she meets a guy named Alden who seems to know her and exactly what’s going on in her life.

Turns out, Lenzi is a Speaker and Alden her Protector. She has the ability to listen to the dead and help them with their unfinished business and move on to their afterlife. It’s Alden’s job to basically help protect her in this instance and to help aid the spirit too, plus he gets to do all the fun paperwork as well. Alden tries to help her along in the best way that he can and explain some of her past lives as Rose, but something different happened this time around with her rebirth, she has no memory of her previous selves like she has before.

Add in the fact that there’s a Malevolent—basically the ghost of a very bad person—stalking her as well, and Lenzi has quite the problems on her hands. She is going to have to learn to master the rules of being a Speaker and hopefully gain her memory back all in a short time or else there will be consequences by the “company” that runs things.

This was a very interesting read, yet I felt like somethings were a little underdeveloped. The world-building needed a bit of work in my opinion. While the world itself is one we already know, it’s more about the goings on of the Speaker and Protector part of the job that felt a little fuzzy to me. We get the general concepts to it and who are few other Speaker and Protectors are, but I felt like that there was more to this “business” than we knew. Nothing shady, but legit, just more. I felt like we only barely scratched the surface of what Lenzi’s destiny was and before you knew it, the book was over.

Perhaps the timing of the book’s publication also had something to do with it. It was published in 2011 and though that wasn’t that long ago, I feel like maybe that’s a part of it? I can’t be sure. I was just hoping for more when it came to this book. While the plot was exciting and the pacing just right, there just seemed to be something missing from this one.

We have a nice budding romance between Lenzi and Alden and of coruse there seems to be something deeper to it than just a budding romance. They have a history together, one that Lenzi isn’t fully aware of. But perhaps it was the lack of detail into Lenzi and Alden’s past that made it hard to fully get behind their current relationship. We do get a few flashbacks memory style when it came to revealing who they used to but at times I still felt like there was something missing.

I also felt like only half the conflict was resolved in this one. True, there’s another installment in the story but it looks like that one will focus on different characters. While these characters will make an appearance in the final book and there’s just the tiniest bit of possibility that remaining issues will get resolved as well, I feel hesitant to say with certainty that it will happen. True, their remaining problems aren’t major and we can easily imagine an outcome, I don’t like the not-knowing part of things.

Shattered Souls was still an intriguing read if not as fully fleshed as I would’ve hoped for. Anything having to deal with ghosts tends to garner my attention. I found that I enjoyed it, but wouldn’t have said no to more in general, more world-building, more conflict, more resolution, more inner details to the work the characters do, and sure, a few more kisses wouldn’t have hurt either. Definitely looking forward to picking up the next book though!


Overall Rating 3.5/5 stars