DISCLAIMER: I received this book as part of the Member Giveaway program.
*mild spoilers*

Frankly speaking, I don't even know where to begin with which part of this books I disliked more.

Alexa is a college student with the emotional mindset of a 13-year old. Fortunately, her naivety and spinelessness evolve toward the end, but for the majority of the story, good lord. She's always treated and comes across as very baby-ish (endurable only for the portions of the story that's she's sick), and every development (integral to the plot or not) is treated with life or death severity. And yes, some of these developments are legitimately deciding factors in their im/mortal fates, but the treatment of the lesser, wholly over-dramtized issues completely dulled the impact of the important ones. Some of this is explained by Alexa's coping strategy of shutting down rather than dealing, and now that she's trying not to do that it's a systems overload for her, but honestly, it ruined any chance of her being a sympathetic character for me, which really damns the entire resolution of the story.

And Christien. Where, oh WHERE do I begin with this little darling? Christien is an incubus. Incubi feed off energy gleaned through sex. Okay. Sure. I can get on board with that. What I can't get on board with is using this as a starting point to then tell a story about sex being redemption. I can't accept sex as a mindless food source characteristic of demon-kind and also in the same breath present it as the very thing that redeems demons from demon-hood. It's a complete contradiction regardless of the motivation (which Lee does make a point to distinguish). It's just not believable to me.

And then there are the lesser side characters. I get that supporting characters are not the focus of the story and thus we don't see their many facets. With Alexa's "friends" this isn't such a big deal, but her mother was so flat and unbelievable I couldn't overlook it. She's such a hot and cold personality that it pulled me right out of the story every time. And for Cristien the Incubus to be afraid of her bipolarity? Just… ugh. Why?

I can't decide if it's the characters I dislike, or the plot, or simply its presentation. The sentences themselves didn't really blow me away, but I'm inclined to give Lee the benefit of the doubt and attribute that to the characters' personalities and points of view. I think at its root this tory has potential, but I'm ultimately very unimpressed with it. ( )

The Innocent: A Myth by Candice Raquel Lee introduces us to Alexa Wyndham, a smart, bookish young college students who eschews her responsibilities as dictated to her by her over-controlling mother, namely to avoid men and graduate from college, to celebrate her 19th birthday and falls ends up in a relationship with a centuries-old incubus.

The book is well written and the story engaging and entertaining. One drawback is the story is told in first person point of view and both of the characters are overly romantic, melodramatic people obsessed with love and romance. To that point, I felt that Ms. Lee really captured her character's voices.

Ms. Lee has also created an interesting mythology and world surrounding succubi and incubi and I hope shechooses to explore these ideas further.

So, I give this book three stars for plot, writing and characterizations. Unfortunately I found Alexa and Christien whinny and almost unberable for most of the book. I didn't like how Christien invaded her privacy and sneaked into her room to take advantagr of her for over a month and she forgave all this because it was true love. Also, it seemed strange that no one had ever thought Alexa was attractivebefore Christien because she was olive skinned, when she grew up in Brooklyn, an area with a very diverse population.

Overall I really enjoyed the book, it was a great, quick, fun read. ( )

*I received a copy of this book in exchange for an unbiased review as part of the Members Giveaway program. This is a long review and brief plot spoilers may follow.*

I didn’t like Alexa at first; she was so skittish and scared of everything that I wasn’t sure how I was going to get through the book having to read about her various fearful reactions to everything under the sun concerning Cristien. Actually, I knew I wasn’t going to finish the book if she was going to continue to be that afraid, but thankfully she grew so much throughout the book that I was proud of her when it ended. I thought the ‘not a morning person’ angle was blown a little out of proportion; she was just demanding for no reason. But even that was easily overlooked because as a whole, she became quite kickass by the end of the book and that agreed with her much more than being a delicate flower.

I can’t say the same, however, for Cristien. I had to learn to like him because at first I found him obsessive bordering on creepy, way too harsh on himself and a little bit too intense for comfort. And I thought Edward Cullen was bad, lol. But then I thought about it and if I had been around for 800 years, causing pain without realizing the magnitude and suddenly I was shown said extent, not to mention the death of every person I’d been with, I probably would have done the same. On that note concerning the sexual parts, his actions on one occasion ran the boundary line of rape and I really hated that Alexa forgave him so quickly when he didn’t even really feel he’d done anything wrong. It took him a while to redeem himself after that. Despite that, I couldn’t deny that the two of them belonged together and he helped encourage her to grow up some, and I think said maturity toughened her for what she later had to do in order to save him…and herself, at a level. I was a huge fan of how deep their love was, how they seemed to fuel and strengthen each other. Excluding a few times in the middle of the book, Lance was obviously the comedic relief in this book and I enjoyed it. He kept things light-hearted and made sure Cristien didn’t take himself too seriously, which he seemed to be on the verge of doing most of the time. I was pretty sure from jump that Abe was going to be a problem so it wasn’t too surprising when I ended up being right. There weren’t too many other characters and I was glad for that; I hate filler characters and situations.

As for the plot itself, I enjoyed that as well. I liked the underlying spiritual themes weaved into the plot; there wasn’t an overt religious tone to the book and I wouldn’t even go as far as to categorize this as a spiritually inclined book. It definitely does have a presence though and it does raise some intriguing questions in terms of how we typically think of things and how we relate situations in our lives to God’s love for us. Most of the spiritual parts of the book were raised as questions or points in conversation or said in platitudes, which were sort of annoying (and I believe Cristien said the same somewhere in the book lol), but they did sort of make the reader ask themselves the same questions. Even though I’m extremely aware that there is a difference between good and evil, I do realize now that the good/evil argument is also entirely subjective and until I read this book, I hadn’t considered that angle at all before. I felt that it was a very cut and dried line, but it’s really not. It’s cut and dried to me, for my sense of morals. But is it overall? No, I guess in the larger picture of things, it’s not. It was strange to realize that because it’s quite obvious to me now, but it is. What may be evil to me may not be evil at all to the next person, which shapes their actions just as much as it shapes mine. That was an interesting thing to explore through this book.

Something else that I liked is that despite the characters’ supernatural abilities, they were not invincible by any means, and they didn’t carry themselves with an invincible or all-powerful complex. They had their limits, there were things they couldn't do or understand and they weren't ashamed of it. I read a lot of supernatural books and I tend to notice an invincibility complex with many of the characters, and the older ones are always worse. By that pattern, Cristien should have thought he was a god. Not only did he not believe that, he was still learning himself and I liked that. There were some errors here and there but they didn’t take anything away from the story. Some of the speech was a little too flowery for me, like the constant reciting of poems, but that was just who they were and I had to remember that Cristien is as old as he is, and Alexa seems to identify with things from around his time period so for them that was simply the dynamic of their relationship. But just as Alexa was coming into her own and Cristien was able to see for himself the depth of Alexa’s love for him, the book ended so I would love a second story about these two and what comes next for them. ( )

Beautiful story, full of passion (love, hate, and friendship). Told in alternating points of view, this story really picks up in a few chapters. An incubi with shut-off emotions that just seem to smolder -mmmmmm. ( )