Act of Defiance

Victors write the history books.

And in their eyes, even Saints can look like Devils.

Available at Amazon.com

Act of Defiance
Adrianne Brooks
ebook, 158 pages
Published June 3rd 2014
Free Read at Amazon.com

Defiance Gray has never had to worry about the Apocalypse. Mainly because it came and went years before she was born. Under the puritan rule of the Church everyone has their place and those unwilling to conform find out all too quickly just how swift punishment can be.

But nothing, not even Priests, frightens Defiance more than the thought of being caught outside after dark. Because when night falls and the bells start to ring, the stone Gargoyles scattered throughout the city come to life and begin their hunt for human souls.

When she starts seeing the Marks, symbols predicting the death of all who wear them, Defiance realizes that the Gargoyles aren’t the only things she has to fear. Which proves to be especially true after she meets Uriel, a winged demon classifying himself as an ‘archangel’.

Defiance Gray has never had to worry about the Apocalypse.
Demons lost the Great War.
The battle was over.

She’d known these things her whole life…but what if she’d been wrong?

I am the devil. But I'm not the only one.

From the very first page, and I'm referencing the Prologue here, I was hooked.

In a post-apocalyptic world where Satan is Lord God and the Four Horsemen are Saints, where women are either nuns or breeders, and the night is haunted by gargoyles seeking those to punish... Defiance Grey lives without a clue as to what the world once was, and what it has become.

A week shy of her eighteenth birthday, Defiance begins to have visions of death depicted through marks upon the heads of its victims just as the Church, the only source of protection, names a new head priest in Father Judas. As his reign begins with the deaths of innocents, including the blacksmith who was her long time friend and mentor, Defiance finds herself volunteering to survive outside the walls after being warned by the ghost of her friend/enemy whom they claim killed herself during the night.

Outside, among the tombstones, Defiance awakens an archangel, long imprisoned as a statue of marble. To her, in this world, he is a demon. One who suffers blindness because of all the iniquity and corruption in the world. His name is Uriel. And he becomes her Savior.

His quest is simple-to kill the Four Horsemen.

Her refusal is firm. To her, they are the long dead Saints of her people. So she seeks out to prove their demise to Uriel so that he may return to... wherever he was while being held captive by stone.

Little does Defiance know that three of the Four Horsemen are living and well, possessing Father Judas and two of the nuns that head her former church. The fourth seeks a new host. And Defiance has become their target.

There's something about demons that allow me to be pulled into this trending world of YA literature. I need a good villain. I need a freaking unbelievable world. Because, frankly, the characters just don't have it in them to hold my interest.

While there's not much accomplished in this first book of the series, the stage is well set. And Defiance is beginning to wonder what exactly it is she's believing in.

3 out of 5 stars.