Review Detail

What I loved:
Wow. Favorite new Para­nor­mal Romance series, thy name is Lux. I've said before that from the moment I first started see­ing the Lux books float­ing around, I avoided them. But the thing that finally con­vinced me to check it out was Julie's review over at All Things Urban Fan­tasy, where she said, "As much as I enjoyed OBSIDIAN, ONYX was even bet­ter." Con­fes­sion time: Some­times I start a book series just to get to a cer­tain book in that series. The best exam­ple would have to be Julie Kagawa's The Iron Queen from The Iron Fey series or even Richelle Mead's Shadow Kiss from Vam­pire Acad­emy. Even though I do believe that each book in a series should be able to stand on its own merit, I will often tell peo­ple to read those series just to get to that spe­cial book. And I know that there is more to come from the Lux series, but until then I'll be say­ing to read this series to read Onyx. Because where Obsid­ian was fun, addic­tive and sexy, Onyx does it so much bet­ter.

Armen­trout wasn't fool­ing around with Onyx. From the very begin­ning it seemed she had a plan to really up the ante with book two and I'm happy to say it didn't dis­ap­point. We have a notice­able amount of deeper char­ac­ter growth for both Dae­mon and Katy, all-around bet­ter plot, and of course, more ban­ter & steamy scenes. So obvi­ously that makes this a more dif­fi­cult review to write with­out spoilers.

Onyx picks up shortly after Obsid­ian and we have Katy, still sar­cas­tic as ever, and Dae­mon, deter­mined to prove to Katy his feel­ings are true and not just the result of their new­found alien con­nec­tion. In fact, the biggest change in Onyx is Dae­mon and his atti­tude for Katy. Gone is the "douche canoe" from the pre­vi­ous novel and let's just say I can totally see when the dude has a Face­book page called Dae­mon Inva­sion. But Katy pushes Dae­mon away at every chance she gets. And while this did get a bit frus­trat­ing as a reader, I can under­stand her reluc­tance to him con­sid­er­ing his past actions, no mat­ter what his inten­tions were. Unfor­tu­nately, her stub­born­ness ulti­mately ends with dev­as­tat­ing con­se­quences that I hon­estly never saw com­ing. I'm not going to give it away, but I'll say I shed a few tears.

What Left Me Wanting More:
One thing I was sad about was Dee's char­ac­ter being slightly put on the back burner in this novel. I missed the rela­tion­ship between her and Katy. Instead, Katy's time in Onyx is almost com­pletely monop­o­lized by a new char­ac­ter, Blake, or as Dae­mon would call him: Bozo, due to his jeal­ously that he man­ages to mar­gin­ally hide from Katy. I wish I could tell you more about Blake, but that would give away way too much of the plot. How­ever, I did think there was a love tri­an­gle brew­ing... and I'm happy that I was wrong. But the best part of this new char­ac­ter? Fun, fun, fun banter!

Quote: "Jesus." Blake rubbed his throat. "You have anger man­age­ment prob­lem. It's like a dis­ease."
"There's a cure and it's called kick­ing your ass."

The plot is so much deeper, sus­pense­ful and com­plex too. I thought I had an idea where things were going at the end of Obsid­ian, but I was so wrong. There were so many twists in this book and not a shred of a Twi­light sim­i­lar­ity, I might add. What I once thought was sim­ply black and white (the DOD, Daw­son and Bethany's dis­ap­pear­ance, Katy and Daemon's con­nec­tion) was turned upside down. Just... wow.

And the steamy scenes between Katy and Dae­mon? I knew based on a guest post at Xpresso Reads that Armen­trout didn't plan on shy­ing away from sex in a YA novel, because really, it's a part of life and coming of age. But, oh, my...

Quote: "Time stopped for us. The world and every­thing I'd been part of only existed out­side the closed bed­room door, but in here, it was only us. And for the first time, there was noth­ing between us. We were open, vul­ner­a­ble to each other. Pieces of our cloth­ing dis­ap­peared. His shirt. Mine. A but­ton came undone on his jeans... and on mine, too."

Final Verdict: I'm not sure what it is about the Lux series or Armentrout's writ­ing that has me beg­ging for more, but I know I am now des­per­ately wait­ing for Opal. And if the cliffhanger at the end of Onyx is an indi­ca­tion of any­thing, it's that the Lux series is like a fine bot­tle of wine, get­ting bet­ter and bet­ter with age.