Book Review - Rebel Belle by Rachel Hawkins | ★★★

Harper Jane Price, 17 years old, has a wonderful life. Apart from her sisters death one year ago, she has a amazing boyfriend Ryan, wonderful friends, loving parents and a bright future. Harper is a southern belle and from the outside perfect. Perfect grades, school president, popular everywhere. But as she forgets her lip gloss in the night of her homecoming dance, her perfect world seems to fall apart. 

“Looking back, none of this would have happened if I’d brought lip gloss the night of the Homecoming Dance.” 

Harper borrows some lip gloss from her best friend and goes off to apply it in the ladies bathroom at school before her name is called for Homecoming Queen. While she is applying it, she is interrupted by the school´s janitor, Mr. Hall. He is mortally wounded and for his last breath, he grabs Harper and exhales inside her mouth. Her history teacher storms in and Harper figures out that he is the one who killed the janitor. As he notices Harper he tries to kill her too, but Harper finds herself with new abilities and fights her teacher, eventually kills him.

“Bruce Wayne's parents get killed and he goes to Tibet or whatever, and Superman is an alien, and Spiderman had that radioactive spider. Me? I kissed a janitor in the school bathroom.”

In Shock of this horrifying event, Harper runs into David Stark, a guy she dislikes since kindergarden, and he surprisingly helps her get it together. She misses her crowning ceremony and is disturbed the rest of the evening. When she´s home and walking around the house, she tries to jump over her family´s 2.5 meter high fence and again feels the new powers seethe inside her. She remembers the janitor appealing her to protect something and calling her a paladin, but she didn´t know what to protect or what a paladin was. Her research answered the latter: A paladin was an honourable knight, defender of a noble cause. So there was only one question left: What is her noble cause?

“Oh, don’t worry about it," I said, trying to sound normal even though all I really wanted to do was run inside the garage and try to lift my dad’s SUV. You know, for scientific purposes.” 

Rebel Belle started off really great. Harper was a wonderful and often hilarious character, the writing of Hawkins was fun and sassy. Until the mid of the book I was really into it, but then I lost my excitement and it took me much more time to read the other half. Although it was still a good  read. 

No parts of the book came across as being forced. It all was easy to read and seemed like it actually could happen. The romance wasn´t overwhelming and very good incorporated. But there were some cliches in the book like the whole "Am I going crazy or not?" part or the feeling of the magic power enter your body as it got transferred from one to another for example, but they didn´t destroy any part of the book. 

I would recommend reading Rebel Belle, even when you are not that big of a fantasy fan. For my part, I definitely continue with this series, the second book was published on the 7th of April 2015. 

Rating:

★★★