Hunting Lila - Sarah Alderson

Hunting Lila – Sarah Alderson

Pages: 315

Publisher: Simon Pulse (Simon and Schuster)

Release Date: 5^th August 2011

Edition: UK paperback, review copy

Other Titles by this Author: Fated, Losing Lila

Lila has two secrets she’s prepared to take to the grave. The first is that she can move things just by looking at them. The second is that she’s been in love with her brother’s best friend, Alex, since forever.

After a mugging exposes her unique ability, Lila decides to run to the only people she can trust – her brother and Alex. They live in Southern California where they work for a secret organisation called The Unit, and Lila discovers that the two of them are hunting down the men who murdered her mother five years before. And that they’ve found them. In a world where nothing and no one is quite as they seem, Lila quickly realises that she is not alone – there are others with special powers out there – and her mother’s killer is one of them...

I have to admit that I judged Hunting Lila solely on the cover and the synopsis, neither of which I found particularly enticing, and I was completely wrong. It’s one of my favourite reads of the year.

The only reason that I decided to give Hunting Lila a shot was because I was going to meet Sarah Alderson at the S&S Summer Blogger’s Presentation and I thought that the least I could do was start the book on the train down to London. One of my best decisions in a long time it turns out. I’m drifting away from the appeal of anything remotely supernatural and I rarely go for thrillers so the intense love I found myself feeling for this story shocked me.

Sadly, as I was late to the party with Lila’s story, Sarah’s reading of the first few pages of the sequel, Losing Lila, at the S&S event did spoil a few of the major plot twists. What was waiting for me at the end of the novel would otherwise have had me clamping a hand over my mouth in surprise. It’s a massive credit to Sarah that such big spoilers didn’t affect my thorough enjoyment of the novel.

Part of my strong feelings for Hunting Lila undoubtedly had something to do with Alex, of course. One of my favourite things about Alex is that he is twenty-two, a fair bit older than your average YA hero and, unlike nearly every other now I'm getting on a bit, he's actually older than me! Alex is also is strong, secretive, hard to read and completely gorgeous and I am a girl, after all. And so is Lila and her internal reactions to Alex are hilarious and I loved the hints at all of the dirty thoughts she was directing his way. That’s something that I, strangely, don't often come across in a YA narration so I thought it was fantastic and it really made Lila a real seventeen-year-old girl.

I quickly became addicted to the high octane, non-stop action and the heart-thumping romance and on finishing Hunting Lila in the early hours of the morning I seriously considered starting Losing Lila. I managed to wait until the next morning. Just about. But I had become so attached to Lila, Alex and Jack that I felt that I needed to stay enveloped in their world.

I would highly recommend overlooking the cover and diving into Hunting Lila. It’s brilliantly addictive and you won’t be disappointed.

Thank you to S&S for providing me with a review copy.

Sophie