Review of Silver Smoke by Monica Leonelle

The first book in the Seven Halos series, Silver Smoke is a fantasy novel by Monica Leonelle for young adults. Set in Honolulu, Hawaii, a place already fantastical to many mainland readers, we meet the heroine, aggressive and slightly reckless fifteen-year-old Brie van Rossum, in the midst of mourning her mother's death. As she struggles for answers about the strange circumstances regarding her mother's death and being the daughter of a rock star, she must also avoid confrontations with the paparazzi who are waiting to catch a possible breakdown on camera.
One of these confrontations ends miserably in a car accident involving her, her brother Pilot, and his best friend, Rykken Camacho, but Brie sees something she knows isn't right. She sees what she believes is her mother on one of the paparazzo's bikes and soon makes a discovery that changes her life—she's a Hallow, a descendent of archangels with supernatural powers like her mother. She discovers others like herself—girls she has known since her moving to the islands. They begin to train her and under their close eye, she prepares herself to embark on a journey to uncover her mother's potentially fatal secret. However, she isn't without enemies—the New Order, a group of Hallows that wants her family dead and has been hunting and killing them for years. And not too long after the accident, her brother meets a mysterious girl that introduces a whole new set of questions affecting Brie's life as a Hallow.
In her writing, Leonelle has a certain grace about how she develops the story through her use of multiple viewpoints, using them to build on each other and presents them quite easily as intertwined but individual stories. Although when she does finally bring these stories together as a whole, it's at times not with the best of ease, but doing this is difficult for any writer and is an art in itself. While Leonelle's strength lies in expression through dialogue, she does leave a little something to be desired in the area of character development through description in the first part of the book, in places I find it perhaps necessary. However, she makes up for this in the latter part of the story. Also, I find it interesting and enjoyable that instead of using the already well established pantheon of archangels and –demons, she reinvents the pantheon and its mythology, making it new in the minds of those already familiar with the stories. There's also the reoccurring themes of fighting one's roots and one's broken family, betrayal, love, consequence, and vengeance. While the book doesn't necessarily provide answers, it provides something relatable for the reader, chronicling the ups and downs of Brie's new life and her self-discovery—situations not unlike those in "real life," yet magnified by ten. I like where Leonelle takes the book and the point at which she ends the story—it'll be interesting to see where she takes the series.

Review by Diana Reed