Review: Inspired (Inspired #1)

'' ''There are worse things than not remembering one's story,'' he said, his whisper-voice turned to gravel. 

''Like what?'' 

When his head swivelled back to face her, his pale face and eyes were dead. ''Like knowing how it ends'' ''

★★★★☆

From Goodreads:
For a muse like Lucianíel, one story’s end is another’s beginning.
In the wake of his author’s sudden death, Luc takes ownership of her surviving creations—four fantastical characters with tales yet to be told—saving them from unwritten lives crumbling around them and giving them a second chance at a literary future.
Luc finds that chance in the unsuspecting mind of Annabelle Iole Gray, a quirky teen with her head in the clouds, nose in a book, and imagination ripe for a brilliant muse’s inspiration.
Or so he hopes.
Neither Luc nor Annabelle, however, realize all they’ve undertaken. Even with a to-write list including accounts of a shape-shifting cat creature, gentle knight-in-training, vigilante skater girl, and a mystery boy smothering in unspoken fear, the most remarkable saga created between author and muse just may turn out to be one stranger than fiction.
Their own.

There are characters already existing in our world. We can't see them but they're there, living independently among us.

The story begins with fragments from different stories. They seem separate at first, only one thing connecting them; their characters are running from a black void diminishing their universes. Then their saviour, the author's muse Lucianíel, appears in the nick of time to bring them to safety. They go searching for a new potential author to write their stories out. They meet Annabelle and begin working with her to create their stories.


It's funny to call the characters of Inspired characters since they are characters of books-to-be inside a book. Got an Inception kind of vibe... They were brought to life by Jean, their original creator, and then adopted' by Annabelle. Just to clarify, when I talk about characters in this review I talk about all of them, not just of the imagined ones.

The story isn't as straight-forward as one would think. There are multiple layers to the story, something for everyone. You think you know what the story really is about, what each of the characters means. The characters created by the creator are, in the beginning, named Wilbur, Uri, Abishan, and Yves. Each of the characters represents different 'weak points' in Annabelle's personality. I'll let you figure out the rest, just not to ruin the fun.

The Inception vibe continues throughout the book, and the ending will blow you away if the book hasn't done it at that point already. I really, really recommend reading this book if you want to experience something a bit different, not just a story, but stories inside stories, inside a story of a novel.