Review: Hazy Shade of Winter

Goodreads Summary: Everyone has wondered at some point: Why am I here? What is my purpose? Where am I going?

Wouldn’t it be nice to have all the answers?

Sam does.

Sam is a Sentinel – a guardian angel who experienced his own Cycle over 800 years ago – assigned to Jude, a teenage girl who hears ghosts. He, like all the other angels, knows the destiny of humankind and how they’re going to get there. Or he thinks he does.

Not everything is perfect in the Heavenly Realm; only those who become Unbound are perfect. But where does that leave the rest of us?

The Unbound Series explores history, fantasy, theology and the paranormal, the nature of our relationships, the power of love and of those who love to destroy it…all through the eyes of a peculiar girl and her angelic Soulmate separated eons ago, but who are eternally bound together. It (liberally) blends cultures, various historical periods, Simon & Garfunkel, and Agnostic, Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, and Islamic beliefs (with a bit of mystic Judaism for good measure), all in the name of paranormal romance.

I thought I was off paranormal romance...but then I picked one up by chance, really REALLY enjoyed it and thought I'd try it again and hope the experiment worked a second time. Hence, Hazy Shade of Winter by Jessica Bradshaw. 

The beginning of this one didn't grip me as I had hoped, in fact I felt confused by everything that was going on...and not a lot was going on. I guess I'm just used to paranormal romances where there were big stakes and we [kind of] just dive right into them. Hazy Shade of Winter was a bit more character driven then that. Also, confusing because a lot of concepts are brought up early on but not fully introduced.

You guys may recall from previous reviews/posts that I'm not the biggest fan of angels. There have been few books about them that I have wholeheartedly enjoyed and would recommend usually because they end up being too preachy or religious for my taste. Hazy Shade of Winter fell into the latter category. The novel took place between the earthly realm where Jude was narrating from and the Heavenly Realm where her guardian angel Sam, was located. And it seemed to me that too much of the novel came from above instead of on Earth. The balance just didn't seem quite right. I wouldn't say it got preachy, but it did make me a bit uncomfortable at times.

Because we don't really see too much of the romance in this paranormal romance except for at the very beginning in the prologue, I don't want to spend too much time on it. Just enough to say that I wasn't a fan. I didn't care much for the way that it was portrayed, with a kind of letting you know what happened and then delving into how it got there. Its hard to explain but I don't want to give anything away in case you guys decide to give this one a go on your own.

Hazy Shade of Winter has received quite a few really good reviews on Goodreads so I saw it through to the end only to find that it simply wasn't my kind of book. A little too religious, a bit on the slow side and I just wasn't finding myself invested in either of the main characters. I gave it a one star rating on Goodreads but, as I've said, others rated it far higher so if it sounds like something that you'd like definitely go check it out!