Meridian by Amber Kizer

Title: Meridian
Author: Amber Kizer
Reading level: Young Adult
Hardcover: 320 pages
Publisher: Delacorte Books for Young Readers (August 11, 2009)
Rating: 4 stars

About the book: (From Amazon)
Half-human, half-angel, Meridian Sozu has a dark responsibility.
Sixteen-year-old Meridian has been surrounded by death ever since she can remember. As a child, insects, mice, and salamanders would burrow into her bedclothes and die. At her elementary school, she was blamed for a classmate’s tragic accident. And on her sixteenth birthday, a car crashes in front of her family home—and Meridian’s body explodes in pain.
Before she can fully recover, Meridian is told that she’s a danger to her family and hustled off to her great-aunt’s house in Revelation, Colorado. It’s there that she learns that she is a Fenestra—the half-angel, half-human link between the living and the dead. But Meridian and her sworn protector and love, Tens, face great danger from the Aternocti, a band of dark forces who capture vulnerable souls on the brink of death and cause chaos.

My Review:
I was really confused about this book. There were some things that I absolutely loved about it and some things I didn’t. Let’s start with the plot shall we?

Meridian Sozu, a 16 year old teenager, has never fit in. She has always felt different and weird. Death has been her companion right since her birth. She finds dead animals and insects wherever she goes, it’s as if the dead are calling out to her, or worse still, they are dying because of her. As Meridian cannot make sense of this, she finds herself as a recluse at 16.

One day, as she barely misses being involved in a terrible accident, she witnesses it nonetheless, and finds herself being moved from her house and her family to her great aunt with the same name Meridian-Merry. She has never met her or even heard from her except for the quilts she gets as birthday presents every year.

When she reaches her great aunt Merry’s place, a huge castle like home, she finds Merry very frail and tired. A guy called Tens is taking care of her. What Meridian learns about Merry and herself is shocking and unbelievable to her.

Meridian Sozu is half human, half angel. She is the medium of the dead to heaven. Unique isn’t it? As Meridian learns how to be the medium and learns more about Fenestra’s and the threat that she is under, she has to be strong and find a way to defeat an enemy who’s strength is way beyond her imagination.

I loved the plot and loved the whole concept of Fenestra’s. The first half was a little slow for me but it really picked up after a 100 pages. I felt no real attachment to Meridian or even Tens for that matter. I would have liked a little more background on Tens instead of a sketch. But I loved the great aunt Merry. I felt her fear, her frustration and her desperate need to teach Meridian everything she could while there was still time. That shows that the author Amber Kizer is more than capable of great characterization.

I also loved the whole Church thing and the villain, Pastor Perimo. Without giving spoilers, I loved what he did to the town. Again, I would have loved if his character was more fleshed out. There was very little Chemistry between Tens and Meridian except at the end. The writing was normal in parts and brilliant in others. I feel the author has a lot more potential than we get to see in Meridian. The book was a quick read and I couldn’t put it down for most of the part.

Having said all this and having written and thought about all the positives and negatives, I have to tell you one thing. After finishing the book, if I have to tell you about the book in the first 10 seconds, all I can think about are the positives. There are scenes and moments from the book that have stayed with me long after finishing it. Meridian definitely has an edge over so many other YA fantasy novels released recently and I will definitely recommend you to read it.

About the author:
Amber Kizer is not one of those authors who wrote complete books at the age of three and always knew she wanted to be a writer. She merely enjoyed reading until a health challenge forced her to start living outside the box. She lives in the Seattle area on a veritable Noah’s Ark—without the big boat and only some of the rain.