Author: Dawn Metcalf
Release Date: July 30, 2013
Publisher: Harlequin Teen
Some things are permanent. Indelible. And they cannot be changed back. Joy Malone learns this the night she sees a stranger with all-black eyes across a crowded room, right before the mystery boy tries to cut out her eye. Instead, the wound accidentally marks her as property of Indelible Ink, and this dangerous mistake thrusts Joy into an incomprehensible world, a world of monsters at the window, glowing girls on the doorstep, and a life that will never be the same. Now, Joy must pretend to be Ink’s chosen one, his helper, his love, his something for the foreseeable future. Failure to be convincing means a painful death for them both. Swept into a world of monsters, illusion, immortal honor and revenge, Joy discovers that sometimes, there are no mistakes.
Indelible is a mysterious and mystical tale into a world hidden from our own, one that's extremely complicated and dangerous. Joy enters the world of the Twixt by mistake, is marked by mistake, and becomes wrapped up in terms and tasks and near creatures she never knew existed. But is she capable of hiding the fact that she's now part of this world by accident, and will she survive the dangers thrown at her?
My initial impressions of Joy weren't necessarily positive. She seems sad, possibly depressed, and leaning closer and closer towards apathy. Her father struggles, her mother is gone, her brother is off at school. If it wasn't for her best friend, Joy would never have a genuine smile on her face. But then a strange boy she barely meets tries to cut out her eye and strange things start happening to her.
The dark paranormal world that exists alongside Joy's normal human life is called the Twixt, and from the Twixt comes Joy's assailant Indelible Ink and his sister. The other-worldliness that surrounds Ink and his sibling is obvious, him more so than her (which is curious in itself), the ways in which they show they aren't human multiply. But what are they? What can they do? How much danger is Joy in now that she's linked to Ink?
I found it both amusing and annoying when, near the beginning, Joy can't get past the fact that Ink went after her for the sole purpose of cutting out her eye. It's amusing because she keeps going on about it like she wants him to apologize, but it's also annoying. She can't get past it, she wants him to fix it, she wants him to understand how much he hurt her and frightened her, but he doesn't necessarily understand that. He's not human. And he can't take it back.
Over time, his attempted removal of her eye becomes less of a problem for her, and their relationship changes. Their 'relationship' is once built on artifice and lies, built on pretending to be close, but the more time Joy spends with Ink, the less she cares. She seems more fascinated by him, by the ways in which he isn't human. Even though she isn't as wary of him as she should be, as I feel she should be (because I think there's a bigger reason why he needed to remove her sight), she is wary of everything else the Twixt introduces her to, the strange monsters and the near constant messages. Of those she is frightened, of the traps and the dangers she is frightened, but over the course of the book she isn't as frightened of Ink. It makes me think he's the one she should protect her heart against the most.
The more I read YA the more I realize how self-centered people can be, especially teenagers. A lot of their time their focus is on them, on how they feel, on what's happened to them, on how they've been wronged by others and it's up to them to fix it. Not all teenagers are like this, there are those who put others before themselves. But as it sometimes happens in YA, when the main character only focuses on what is happening to them and around them, the bigger picture goes unseen until time has almost run out.
I found this book to be rather fast-paced with an almost frantic tone at times with Joy struggling to understand and brace for what's coming next. If this is the start of a trilogy or series, I'm curious as to where the next book will go. It felt like a tale to be contained in one book but I do have an unanswered question or two. And I still think there's something more behind the reason Ink had for trying to cut out Joy's eyes.
(I received an e-galley of this title to review from Harlequin Teen through NetGalley.)
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