Saturday 19 December 2015

Review on The Felix Chronicles: Freshmen





After losing his parents to a terrible house fire, Felix August starts his freshman year at Portland College with low expectations. The loss of his parents taking a huge toll on him, Felix is reluctant to make new friends and attend parties. That is until he meets his roommate Lucas Mayer, a reality tv star with a lot of personality. However Felix soon finds out that not everything is frat parties and college girls, as people start to go missing in the forest close to campus, and Felix has started having the same dream about being burnt to death over and over. Not to mention the serial killer who is going after teenagers and seems to be targeting those without any siblings. Felix soon finds out that there is a much bigger picture, and it is up to him to stop the killer known as the Faceman before he kills anyone else. With the help of his friends, and the mysterious groundkeeper, Felix must find the connection between these seemingly unrelated events and stop them before it is too late.


This book was a really interesting read and perfectly mixed contemporary with fantasy. The novel starts with Felix starting university, and the struggles he goes through with coming to terms with his parents death and not allowing himself to get swept up into university life. He arrives with his childhood best friend Alison, who is the only person who knows about what happened to Felix’s parents. I loved the relationship between Felix and Alison, and was extremely happy that their relationship didn’t turn romantic. It is rare for male and female characters to remain as just friends throughout a YA novel and I loved that this was the case with Felix and Alison. They care about each other deeply and sacrifice themselves for each other on multiple occasions, but the fact that it remained platonic was a breath of fresh air.

I seem to be finding it a rare occurrence to find a male protagonist in a fantasy YA novel, so having Felix as the protagonist was interesting. I always feel that the majority of YA books seem to be more based towards female readers, but The Felix Chronicles seems to have the male reader in mind too. Felix seems like a typical eighteen year old college student so I loved watching him get thrown into a world that he didn’t even know existed.

I loved Lucas from the start and he soon became my favourite character. I always seem to love the obnoxious, over confident character in YA novels, and it was no different with Lucas. Although he is a bit of a player I loved that he didn’t go off with the frat boys and try to be popular which he easily could have done, but stayed with a less popular group of people just because he enjoyed being with them. I always love relationships where two characters can’t stand each other but develop feelings over time, and I enjoyed seeing that developing between Lucas and Caitlyn. I did however feel that Harper lacked character, and that her main purpose was to be a love interest for Felix.

I did have a few issues with the plot, as although I read the diary entry from Felix’s auntie twice, I still felt that I didn’t fully understand what The Source was, and the closest explanation that I could make up for it was that it was similar to The Force in Star Wars. I felt as if seeing as this was such an important part of the story it could have been explained a little better. I also felt that there were too many instances where a character was presumably dead, only to be found alive. Felix’s tendency to seek vengeance against his enemies and enjoy torturing them almost gets his friends killed on multiple occasions, and I felt that something needed to happen to make Felix see that seeking vengeance was the wrong thing to do.

Although I loved the main storylines, I felt that there were too many subplots that weren’t tied into the main story arc at the end. For example I didn’t really understand what the point of the subplot involving the movie star was, as although there seemed to be some sort of cult going on, it didn’t really seem to have any point in the story overall. However as this is the first book in the series it is likely that it will be more important in later instalments. I did however find myself wanting the book to get back on track when this happened, as I was mostly concerned for Felix and his friends. I also felt that it was pointless to give certain characters who were only there to show that people were getting killed in the forest so much back story. There was multiple times when characters would be introduced and killed in the same chapter, yet we were told about their lives in great detail which I felt was not needed. I felt that at 500 pages long, the book was slightly too lengthy and there was a lot of small details that were unneeded to drive the plot forward. I also felt that the first 200 pages were slow, as there is only a couple of instances where we see anything supernatural happening, and takes a while to reveal that Felix is not just an ordinary college kid. I felt myself getting bored during the first quarter of the book, and it wasn’t until Felix found out what he was that the book started to keep me interested. However once the pace picked up I really enjoyed the book. For me it would have just been a little more enjoyable if there was less subplots and the story had focused more on Felix.

Overall I enjoyed this book and recommend it to fans of Harry Potter and Star Wars.



The Felix Chronicles is now available to purchase!








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