The Demon's Lexicon (The Demon's Lexicon Trilogy, #1)

by Sarah Rees Brennan

[Jo]

Nick has been on the run for as long as he can remember. His mother stole a charm off of a very powerful magician before he was born, and he wants it back. He and his older brother, Alan, move around the country with their deranged mother to escape the magicians and the demons the magicians send after them. But then Alan gets a demon mark - a mark that leads to possession and then death - when he tries to help two other teenagers who are in trouble. Nick is the only person who can save him, but that gets harder to do when he starts to think Alan is hiding things from him.

I liked this book, but it doesn't match up to all the hype surrounding it. It just wasn't very "wow!" to me, like I expected. The novel starts off wuite slow; it only starts to pick up after three or four chapters, and the chapters aren't short. I actually ended up putting the book down to read some others I was excited about.

When the book did start picking up, it got to half way through the book before anything, in my opinion, really happened. When things did start happening, though, it gets quite intriguing. Nick has all these questions about Alan's strange and secretive behaviour, and there's how they go about trying to get rid of the demon mark.

I didn't like most of the characters, though. Nick is too angry, aggressive, selfish and insensitive, which bugged the hell out of me, but is explained by the end. Alan was too sensitive, and Mae ws too much of a girl in my opinion. Jamie was best, with his sarcastic sense of humour shining through when he was most scared - which was pretty much all the time.

I did find the ending very surprising; you're left guesing all the way through, but this ending is not what you expect. Still, when the book ended, I was left a little unsatisfied, a little "is that it?" Although it's an urban fantasy, I don't feel there are enough fntasy elements that we actually get to see, as most happens outside the group of people we follow. I was pretty underwhelmed, but I will be checking out the sequel, The Demon's Covenant when it comes out next year. A good book overall, but not as amazing as I expected.

**I'd like to add that I wrote this review after I finished the book earlier in the wook, and since finishing it, I have been thinking a lot about the book. Perhaps my review is a bit harsh when it comes to the characters. I think I might actually like them all, in their own way. I think I was just a little disappointed when I originally wrote the review.