From Goodreads: Having lost the love of her life, nineteen-year-old Charlize Sweet has given up on guys forever. Then she meets Xanzeer.

Not your mother’s superhero, Charlize is seriously crushing on this hotter than fire bad boy. Nowhere near being human, he’s also a known hit man who seems to detest her. To make matters worse, other dark forces show up with the appearance of his evil Ex.

Soon caught in the crossfire of this unholy threesome, enter Charlize’s reliable but jealous detective friend, Jesse. Joining forces with Xanzeer’s evil Ex to stop The Kiss, Charlize gets trapped in a fiery netherworld where wishes end and reality begins. The only thing that can possibly save her? The mystical power within herself she never knew she had.

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I’m sorry to say that I didn’t really care for this novel, which is unfortunate because it had such a good premise (though a bit flawed), an intriguing title, and a great cover.  The story itself, however, was a bit lacking.  I just felt like the story wasn’t tied together very well. I spent much of the beginning of this novel thoroughly confused as it moved too fast with little-to-no explanation. Then it abruptly jumped ahead 3 years, and 50% into the novel, I was still trying to connect all the dots, which isn’t how I like to spend my reading time.  I just felt like the plot jumped around a lot, with way too much action intertwined and overshadowing the meat of the story.

Likewise, I found the story to be predictable.  That’s not always a bad thing, but I was hoping I’d be wrong on occasion.  As soon as we met Xanzeer, I had a sneaking suspicion who he was in relation to the story, and it turns out I was right.  I was hoping there would be a twist of some sort within the novel, but things unfolded basically the way I thought they would, and while Xanzeer was an interesting character, I never felt any endearment or connection to him or any of the other characters.  I felt like Healy really wanted to shroud all her characters in mystery, which she did well, but in the end, I think that made them too difficult for me to really to get to know. But out of all of them, I really hated Jesse.  He was an extremely annoying character that Charlize needed to kick to the curb.  I couldn’t find one endearing thing about him as I read, and that irked me since he was in much of the novel.  He’s a bungling idiot who believes he is better than, and can boss around, women, and I really had a hard time with him.

But the cool thing, characters aside, is that this novel deals with genies.  Yep, like the one in Aladdin.  This really piqued my interest once I realized what was going on, and I wish there had been more explanation of the genies and their magic instead of some of the running around that went on in the novel, but perhaps we’ll learn more in the next installment of this series.  I honestly haven’t decided if I’m going to read the next book as I wasn’t too impressed with the storyline of the first, but I’m dying to know more about the genies, so I probably will check it out.  Two stars.

I purchased this novel from Amazon.