Review of Struck by Jennifer Bosworth

Title/Author: Struck (Struck #1) by Jennifer Bosworth
Publisher/Date published: FSG BYR, May 8th 2012
How I got this book: received it from the publisher through NetGalley

Goodreads summary: "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."

I have mixed feeling about Struck. I was so incredibly excited to get to reading it and before I started I was just completely ready to fall in love with it. And I waited. And waited. And waited some more, but it didn't fully happen in the end. Though I did end up enjoying it!

The problem for me was that it all just seemed to take such a LONG time! I mean, the plot crawled at a snail's pace and I get that we needed backstory and we needed to realise what was going on and what was at stake and all of it, but well, I could have done with a little more actual action and a little less people walking and talking. And seriously, if everyone had been a bit more upfront about themselves and their respective cults, this whole mess hadn't really had to have happened at all.

While I'm always a bit apprehensive when it comes to cults, the way they were portrayed in Struck was really interesting! And really well done! I could easily see how people could go with both the Seekers and with Prophet. And though they were opposites in this, the two groups were eerily similar in both their followers and leaders. I could see how Mia couldn't make out who were the 'good' guys in all this, because until we got closer to the end, neither could I. I'm still not convinced that there were actual good guys in this, but one seemed to be a lesser evil in the end.
Cults scare me. It is scary how easily you can get sucked in and get sort of (or actually) brainwashed.

I thought the paranormal element of lightning causing these side effects was fascinating! I'm really hoping that in the next book in the series we'll get to find out more about the how and why of this.

Mia was a good main character. She had a lot of anger and distrust and shame and bless her for it! She's fiercely loyal to her family and that's always something that I admire in a person. Though I did think she was trying to control her brother a bit too much at one point. I liked that even though she had feeling for Jeremy, she didn't let it blind her to everything else.
Jeremy himself I'm still haven't made up my mind about. Sometimes I thought he was a jerk and I was questioning his motives and I don't know, I just never completely fell for him. There were also times when I really liked him, I'd just would have liked him to open up to Mia more and a bit sooner. Communication people! It's a wonderful thing.

And you know how I said the plot moved very slowly for most of the book? Towards the end it definitely starts to speed up and there are BIG REVELATIONS and scary things and blood and just GAH! ACTION! YES! Epic clash of the cults and lightning and just all of it! And right then and there I was in the moment and I just wished the whole book had made me feel like that!
Also, I wash finishing Struck while a thunderstorm was raging outside. Yeah, that was both kinda scary and appropriate.

The ending leaves me very much wondering what will happen with Mia and the cult and the faith of the world in general. So while I didn't love Struck, the cults are fascinating and immensely scary and I really ended up enjoying the story, but mostly the final part when thing started to get exciting very fast! It was all in all a pretty good debut and I'll definitely be picking up the next instalment in this series!

My rating: 3,5 stars