Lightning Rider
Year: 2013
Author: Jen Greyson
Length: 314 pages

I’m not really sure how this book got into my Kindle collection. I think it might have been from a time that I saw someone on Facebook post about a free e-book and I just downloaded it because the title seemed interesting. Now that I’m getting around to reading these books, I’m finding them to be a little outside the norm for what I like to read. That’s not to say I’m against reading anything in the “New Adult” or “Urban Fantasy” genres, it’s just that I wouldn’t choose them first if I had a selection in front of me.

Of course, I can see that the popularity of strong and independent female heroines in the YA and NA genres have definitely spawned a number of authors who want to capitalize on this trend, and this book is no different. That being said, most of my qualms with this book lie with the characters. The majority of the characters seemed quite flat and sometimes just reacted irrationally in order to manufacture conflict. Of the one or two characters who were more fleshed out, who were, fortunately, the two main characters, I felt that the heroine could have had more skills carry over from the present day into her time travels.

Aside from a few moments here and there where I wasn’t quite sure what was going on, the plot was pretty straightforward and solid. Of course, this applies to the main plot, as the subplot featuring the heroine’s father felt underdeveloped (even though I really wanted to know about his adventures). Granted, this is a limitation of the first-person POV, but it would have been nice to intersperse a bit with his time travels to provide a contrast to the clearly more powerful main character. I also would have liked some more explanation on the mechanism of the “lightning riding,” but from what I gathered of the synopsis of the second book in this series, that will be explained in greater detail later on.

A generic Young Adult novel with a pretty engaging plot, I give Lightning Rider 3.0 stars out of 5.