Torn

Title: Torn (Trylle #2)
Author: Amanda Hocking

Initial thoughts: I'm team Loki.

I feel like there's not a lot to these books.You get very quick descriptions and explanations, nothing really in-depth. I guess if you're trying to keep it within a certain number of pages, that makes sense, but I would love to get to know so much more about the Trylle community and the people in it. It works well as a YA fantasy; better even than many newer YA books that are coming out that are less for a YA audience and more for an adult audience but are written with characters and plots that put them into YA. Those kinds of books include more adult scenes that the YA audience doesn't really need to be introduced to unless you want to encourage teen pregnancies and such things. I don't mean to be a prude, but sex scenes really should be limited to adult books. You can make it obvious that two characters are together or even that they're sleeping together without going into details. When you describe it in such magical terms, of course teens are going to want to do it even more. Anyway, these books happily haven't included any such scenes and thus are fully appropriate for a YA audience. They do have romance, and the love triangle (square?) is forming. Out of the three potential boys, I definitely am rooting for Loki. Yes, Finn loves her and she loves him, but he doesn't give her the respect she's due. Oh, he honors her as the princess, but he puts her status above who she actually is. He won't allow himself to love her because she isn't allowed to love him back, despite what they both feel. When she tries talking to him, he retreats and tells her that it can't happen, and then he shows up and does things that contradict his words. If he truly believes it's his duty to stay away from her, then he just needs to do that and stop leading her on. If he would rather follow his heart then he needs to stop running away all the time. Finn's problem is that he is torn between the two and won't fully commit himself to one. Tove is a lot of fun, and they make good friends, and he would make a good king to her queen, but she doesn't love him and he doesn't love her. It's just going to make things super awkward between them and could even ruin the great friendship thing they've got going on. Then you have Loki. She likes him, though she won't admit it because she knows she can't be with him because he is from a rival tribe and she wants to do right by her kingdom. He likes her, though he has a hard time truly showing it because he prefers to act the clown than be serious, though he's more honest than he lets on. I figure he is at least Tove's equivalent status-wise in the Vittra society so he is high enough to marry a princess as well as plenty powerful (those two things are nearly interchangeable here). They want peace between the two kingdoms, which is why Elora married Oren in the first place, but that didn't work because they didn't love each other; honestly, they practically hated each other. Wendy and Loki actually do care about each other so a marriage between them might be able to accomplish what Elora and Oren couldn't and unite their two tribes. That's what I want to see in book 3.

In general, these books are fairly simplistic, but they are fun. Set in more of a modern society, they would be easier for general readers to understand while still getting their dose of fantasy (similar to Harry Potter). I'm waiting to see if there's a good take-away message or if I'm going to dislike how things end.