Review: Akarnae

Item: Akarnae
Rating: 5
Author: Amanda Marie

Posted February 27, 2015 in Reading, Review / 0 Comments

Akarnae by Lynette Noni
Series: The Medoran Chronicles #1
Publisher: Pantera Press (2015)
eARC (397 pages)
Via: NetGalley
Rating:
Also by this author: Raelia
Also in this series: Raelia
Reading Challenges: Read 2015

Synopsis

Dreading her first day at a new school, Alex is stunned when she walks through a doorway and finds herself stranded in Medora, a fantasy world full of impossibilities. Desperate to return home, she learns that only a man named Professor Marselle can help her… but he’s missing.
While waiting for him to reappear, Alex attends Akarnae Academy, Medora’s boarding school for teenagers with extraordinary gifts. She soon starts to enjoy her bizarre new world and the friends who embrace her as one of their own, but strange things are happening at Akarnae, and Alex can’t ignore her fear that something unexpected… something sinister… is looming.
An unwilling pawn in a deadly game, Alex’s shoulders bear the crushing weight of an entire race’s survival. Only she can save the Medorans, but what if doing so prevents her from ever returning home?
Will Alex risk her entire world–and maybe even her life–to save Medora?

Find the book: Goodreads

Alexandra Jennings is being sent to a boarding school in Oregon. Her parents are given the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work under a famous archeologist in Siberia. Alex cannot go with them. She is being sent to the International Exchange Academy where she will be unable to contact her parents for eight months due to a communication dead-zone.

So Alex arrives at the International Exchange Academy where her greeting consists of being shoved into a fountain. Needless to say, Alex is not pleased at all. Crossing the threshold to the headmaster’s office, Alex finds herself in a wooded area that is definitely not the International Exchange Academy.

First Alex meets this creepy guy named Aven who then mysteriously vanishes when Jordan and Bear run into Alex. It is Jordan and Bear that clue Alex in that she is no longer in our world (which they call Freya) but in Medora on the Akarnae Academy grounds.

Alex is told that Akarnae is a school for the gifted. Jordan can turn invisible and walk through walls and Bear can convince people to do what he wants. Alex is completely shocked and rather convinced that this is magic which the boys quickly say is not the case.

I have to agree with Alex on this point. There are a lot of things in Medora that seem a whole lot like magic. For example, there is a door opening to pull Alex into Medora, the food is teleported into the food court, and there is a sentient library.

The only person who can help Alex return to our world is the headmaster, Professor Marselle, and he is mysteriously absent. So Alex enrolls in Akarnae since she has no other way home and makes the best of it. Then things get a bit more interesting.

I really like both Bear and Jordan. They both have very interesting lives. I would love to know more about both of them, especially Jordan, before they arrived at Akarnae. I think those would make rather interesting stories.

I really liked this book and had a hard time putting it down. That is not exactly a good thing when I have to get up early in the morning to go to work. I survived and I finished the book. It is great and the cover is gorgeous!

Thanks so much, Pantera Press!!