Author: Wendy Higgins
Release Date: May 1st, 2012
Publisher: HarperCollins
Pages: 464
Age Group: Young Adult
Source: ARC for review

Rating: ★★★★★

What if there were teens whose lives depended on being bad influences? This is life for sons and daughters of fallen angels in Sweet Evil.

Tenderhearted Southern girl, Anna Whitt, was born with the sixth sense to see and feel emotions of other people. She’s aware of a struggle within herself, an inexplicable pull toward danger, but it isn’t until she turns sixteen and meets the alluring Kaidan Rowe that she discovers her terrifying heritage, and her will-power is put to the test. He’s the boy your daddy warned you about. If only someone had warned Anna.

A cross-country trip to meet her father forces Anna to face the reality that hope and love are not options for her kind. When she confronts her destiny, will Anna embrace her halo or her horns?

There are so many angel and demons books out there. It's really starting to become one of the more popular genres within YA. With that comes some downsides though. If you're looking at a sub genre that has a lot of books written for it, you really want to see something unique. There will always be some similarities simply to them being in the same genre. However, a great author can always come up with something new and unique that will really capture the minds of the readers. I strongly feel that Wendy was able to accomplish this feat.

Sweet Evil is really different to a lot of the angel/demon YA books out on the market today. It takes a different look at the sub genre, with it's focus on Nephilim I also found the Dukes to be a very interesting part of this story as they represented all of the different sins. It's just a very interesting story. It starts off where you're just learning about how Anna can sense emotions being seeing auras of different colors around people, which actually reminded me of a character in another book that had that same ability. But then the story takes some crazy turns from there. You learn about her mom and dad, and who they truly were. And you learn exactly what Anna is. Then you're introduced to Kaidan, the Dukes and a whole other cast of characters. One of the things I really liked about the story was the Sword, I won't go into much detail because I don't want to give much away but I am curious to see where thing go with that.

The characters in this book are beyond amazing. Anna is such a strong character, she has to go through a lot in this book but she always seems to stay extremely strong through it all. Jay is one of those best friends that is always there for Anna, which I really liked. He was really one of my favorite characters. Kaidan was a great character to. There is a lot of tension between him and Anna, but with certain things going on in the story nothing can really blossom from that. At the start of the book, Anna's dad is sent to jail right after she is born. So you don't really hear much about him until later on in the book, but he come to be a very important character later on. You also don't really hear a lot about Anna's mother, since she dies giving birth to Anna during the first couple pages of the book. But you do learn how and why all of that happened throughout the book.

Patti was another of my favorite characters, she raised Anna and is really a fun lighthearted character. I really wonder if there is more to her than we learned in this book, but I guess we will have to wait and see. One of the major parts of this book was the Dukes. And of course you have their children also, but I really enjoyed the concept of the Dukes. They weren't the most pleasant of characters, but they really helped to make the book. The final character I want to talk about is Sister Ruth, you don't really learn much about her, but she does have a really huge and interesting impact on the story. I'm sure there are a few others I can talk about, but I feel like I gave you a nice overview. The characters are really wonderful, I could go on forever talking about them. As you can tell by the two paragraphs just with descriptions of a few of the characters.

The ending of this book was insane. It really wanted to see some things happen which sadly didn't. But I can't really say I was disappointed because I was still extremely impressed by the way things ended. The Summit was one of the more intense part of the book, but I feel that was the intention of it. It was just really interesting to see how everything panned out. I went into it expecting to see it turn out a certain way, and I was completely wrong. I am really intrigued to see where things go in book two, I really want to learn more about the Sword... Which I won't go into detail about, you will have to learn about it in the book. But I got a feeling it will be a epic part of the series in the future, I am just not sure how it will come into play or when. But it should be interesting.

I've read a lot of great books this year, and Sweet Evil is definitely among them. This book is purely amazing, as you can probably gather from my massive amounts of rambling about the characters and just the story itself. I highly recommend that everyone adds this book to your summer reading list, so make sure to mark your calendars for May 1st. It would be a sin not to, pun intended.

Thanks to HarperCollins for providing me with a copy of this book for review.