It's been a long time since I couldn't put down a book or stop breathing quickly. I loved the feisty heroine and her stubbornness. I really enjoyed this book and can't wait for the next one in series.

I stared reading this book because it sounded really interesting and I'm not into sciene fiction, but I thought this would be different.
And it was, to some point. But after around 30% It began to feel extremely flat for me and I couldnt follow the story line anymore.

DNFed at 40%

This is a fine, fun, paranormal invasion story. With a lot of action but I found that the characters were just not as fleshed out as i'd have liked them to be by 40% into the story. I think this is something I may have liked when I was younger but just feels lacking for me now.

Violet City by Page Morgan

In this book, we see an alien invasion of New York City through Penelope “Pen” Simmons’s eyes. We follow her as she realizes her sewage treatment plant field trip has just gone from boring to deadly. Pen and her classmates try to escape the aliens and their weapons, but Pen ends up going from one bad situation to another. When an alien unintentionally rescues her, Pen decides it doesn’t hurt to stay with the alien who hasn’t killed her yet. As they stumble through dangerous situations, they start questioning who the real enemy is. Ultimately, they both have to decide which race is worth dying for.

My favorite part of the book was Pen. She is such a well thought out character. I think in a lot of stories, the heroine is often overcome by her emotions and lets those emotions make decisions for her. Decisions where I, as the reader, am yelling at the character to get some control and THINK! But I respect Pen because she does think! She’s seen some hard things in her young life. She knows enough to know that panicking or doing what is easy, won’t help her. Pen has the thought process of a real survivor. Pen is a convincing character because her decisions and motivations are realistic.

I also loved the complexity of Rowan. He is the alien that saves Pen, though maybe unintentionally. He is introduced as kind of a soldier type who just follows orders. That seems to be his comfort zone, but he is unable to stay there. Pen is constantly pushing him to evaluate what he is doing and challenging him to think differently. My favorite thing about Rowan is that he truly listens to Pen. He listens to what she wants him to do and actually does it. No matter what it might cost him, he listens.

Finally, I want to talk about Page Morgan’s writing style. She’s amazing! I felt like I could see New York City being invaded. Her world building is woven seamlessly into the story. She made an alien invasion seem real instead of outlandish.

I liked this book. It was paced well and didn’t get weighed down by explanatory information that we didn’t need. The story moved! It also surprised me frequently. I have read a lot of YA sci-fi/fantasy books, but Page Morgan took me in some new directions. I will definitely check out her other books.

You are very much thrown into the world right from the beginning! I was so confused with the main character for some of the beginning. There were some parts where I actually enjoyed the main love interest, Rowan, more than I did the main character. Their love is definitely a slow burn, but the dystopian Earth and alien dynamic was actually really interesting and not what I expected from this novel. By the end of the novel, I was wishing for more romance and at least an afterward of their story, but ended up being left with a little sadness in my heart. Overall, it was a very good story and very fast paced! It was a different take on an alien invasion that I actually really enjoyed!
Thank you NetGalley for giving me the opportunity of reading this book in exchange for a review

Thank you to BookGoSocial and NetGalley for providing me with an e-arc of this book.

This was a fun fast paced read from beginning to end. I enjoyed the story and found it creative for a first contact book. While I didn’t connect deeply with our main characters I still had a good time following them on their journey. I did not care much for the romance and felt the story could have been just as compelling without it. The writing was generally good and straightforward though there were small moments where I felt I had to go back and read things over again because some transitions weren’t as smooth or even contradictory. For example the characters note they are entering a single story home but later go upstairs in that same house...? Little things like that which took me out of the book, they were rare but noticeable. Overall, I had a good time with this book and I’m glad I picked it up!

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for an honest review!

Today is the publication day for Violet CIty by Page Morgan. Violet CIty is a YA romance between a human and a human-looking alien. The story revolves around Pen, who a normal teenage girl. Suddenly, the aliens invade, and an alien who Pen nicknames Rowan saves her. Here an excerpt from when Pen first meets Rowan:

"It’s a guy. A guy, with brown hair that reaches almost to his ears. There’s a stylish wave to it, like he might actually have stopped to comb through it before he got dressed in his robotic suit and started up his space pod to come attack my city.
He has eyes. Just two of them, thank goodness, and they’re normal size—not huge dinner plates like the green aliens I’ve seen on TV all my life. He has lips, a chin, and smooth cheeks. Ears, too. The only weird thing about him, the only feature that stands out as non-human, is a band of silver metal around his neck."

Sometimes you're just in the mood for a light, fluffy romance, and you're not interested in anything deep and dark. That's exactly when you should read Violet City. It is a fun, light-hearted romance between a human and paranormal creature that I would recommend for fans of Twilight, Hush, Hush, etc. except it's not as dark. If that's what you're in the mood for, you won't regret checking out this book!

A couple of weeks ago I saw this book here on Goodreads and it immediately grabbed my attention. I'm in a sci-fi mood at the moment, but I also don't want to read too heavy books because my brain is not capable of understanding those. This book sounded like the perfect solution. A Sci-Fi, but just not too complicated. And then I discovered that the book was on Netgalley and that I could just click read now! I got the book right away and I really looked forward to reading it.

The book turned out to be exactly what I had expected it to be. If you love all those more classic YA's like Twilight, Fallen and Beautiful Creatures you will for sure enjoy this story too! Although there is certainly a lot going on, the book is in the first place a romance. A romance between a human girl and an alien boy while aliens are taking over the world and killing half of the population. And yet I enjoyed it immensely!

Mostly because the romance felt quite natural in a way. Of course, they only know each other for a few days when the romance escalates, but during those days they've gotten to know each other's world, where they come from, how they grew up and they've also seen loads of each other's personality. And since the book never presents this relationship as the kind of relationship worth sacrificing everything for, I just enjoyed the cuteness of an alien discovering human tenderness.

Of course, I would have loved to learn and see way more of the politics. I mean, taking over the world is not an easy task and it's implied that it went differently in different area's of the world, but it's also quite powerful that among all this the story focusses on two people and how they're dealing with everything. It also makes the conflict personal, it makes both of them understand what's going on and why they are reacting the way they are.

I will for sure read the next book in this series too, because I'm quite curious how it will continue and which parts of the universe we might explore!

I was initially torn whether to rate this 4 or 5 stars, but since reading this book I haven't been able to stop thinking about it! So I've decided to settle on an unofficial 4.5 (rounded up). Violet City is an alien-invasion sci-fi, which follows Penelope Simmins, your average teenager, and 'Rowan', her alien captor, a Volkranian who eerily resembles a human. The first chapter jumps straight into the action and I was hooked straight away, I binged the entire book in less than 24 hours, because I just needed to know what happened next! It was fast-paced, action-packed and all-round fantastic!

My favourite thing about this book was definitely the romance, especially the chemistry and tension built between the 2 main characters. I think it happened very naturally (even though they hadn't known each other very long) I think the progression of their character development made it feel like they'd known each other forever. I also loved the tiny bit of spice, which I wasn't expecting as this is classed as YA, but it was a nice surprise.

Also, we need to talk about THE ENDING! I won't go into the nature of the plot, but just know this one hits hard, and I NEED the sequel ASAP Page!! (please say there is one, I'll wish for it for the rest of my living days). My heart feels like it's been ripped to shreds.

The only slight fault (it's not even a fault to be honest) is that at the beginning of the book Penelope does act like your stereotypical dumb teenager and some of the stuff she does made me cringe and think "what are you doing girl?!" However, I do think it accurately reflects how the average person would react when panicking, in contrast to female leads usually shown in YA literature.

I would recommend this book to fans of sci-fi & paranormal romance (or those who are just wanting to try it - I feel like this is a great start!)

When an alien invasion takes root in New York City, Pen Simmons, Violet City's teenage lead, remarks that it's "like a big budget space movie has come to life over our heads." She uses this point of reference often, as the novel progresses and its plot unfolds. Dead bodies roll down the pavement like stunt doubles, the destroyed city looks like a post-apocalyptic film set, and when she first encounters one of the aliens, beginning a tenuous alliance that later turns into something more, the whoosh of air rushing from the airlock of a spacesuit first enters her ear as something she'd only heard before in sci-fi movies.

It seems a trivial detail, but in terms of what it reveals about Violet City's execution as a work of science fiction, it's critical. Page Morgan, ultimately, relies on the reader's knowledge of pop culture as a crutch in building both the landscape of post-invasion Manhattan and the internal logic of the world of the Volkranians, her species of coldly logical, ruthless invaders. Rather than a deliberate entry into the genre, it feels like a collection of details assimilated from like sources––the vague trope that people panic in disaster informs every glance we get of post-invasion New York City, while the Volkranians are aliens of the wholly expected Vulcan variety: formal-speaking, human-faced, and only a hair's breadth away at all times from offering up an explanation eerily similar to "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few."

This isn't to say that alien invasion concepts have to be wildly original in order to be valid––rather that in Violet City's quest for broad appeal and familiarity, it neglects the opportunity to introduce something new. Even the execution of the book's central hook, the budding romance between Pen and one of the invaders, whom she nicknames Rowan, is expected, snagging on conflicts even a casual viewer of sci-fi could predict at a glance.

The book also suffers from a severe dearth of proper scaffolding with regards to character: though it's perfectly readable and its pacing moves at a fast clip, there's something off at the heart of its planning, and it doesn't reveal itself until the final act, where Pen takes several almost existential risks, and they all ring hollow because there's nothing the story equipped her with that she lacked in the beginning. Though character work like this takes the back seat to the action of most stories, its skillful implementation is essential: a protagonist must substantially change, and the obstacles they face must be the catalyst for their doing so.

In one of the most important early scenes, however, Violet City has Pen jump to defend the life of an alien she doesn't even know––and succeed. From there, though it's clear the author wants to write a character whose morals and worldview change after getting close to the enemy, the approach has nowhere to go. Because the book opens by showing the reader that Pen is willing to act to protect one of the aliens, and can work up courage in the face of mortal peril, it renders all of the objections Pen has to doing the same later on entirely obsolete. Nothing's at stake in the event that Pen fails. And the threat that she will is virtually nonexistent.

From here, it doesn't matter when either of the major characters' lives are in danger. It doesn't matter when Pen gets the chance to abandon her shaky alliance and doesn't take it. It doesn't matter when ships crash or shots are fired or action tears through the pages. The story, in its construction, wants for everything a narrative needs to breathe.

When movies destroy landmarks and level city blocks, they do it because it's a shortcut: when cities that loom large in popular imaginations turn to rubble on-screen, it evokes at least an echo of what a story would otherwise have to do to awaken that feeling. In some regard, it must work––after all, screenplays keep using it. But a shortcut is no substitute for real groundwork. I may have seen plenty of what happens in Violet City in a movie before, but that doesn't mean it cuts closer to me once it transpires here. In fact, that might be the very reason it doesn't.

Violet City by Page Morgan is a fantastic novel! I loved every moment of it and found the writing just amazing.

(quote)But I don’t feel irritated. I feel… full. Like I do whenever I see the sparking glow of a firefly at dusk, or when our resident chipmunk skitters close to the sliding glass doors. Like I’ve been given an unexpected gift, and I have no idea what to do with it.
This is doomed. The logical side of my brain screams at me to see reason.
It’s wasting its breath.
Like with the firefly, I’m going to try to catch it. Like with the chipmunk, I’m going to get as close as I can before it runs away.(quote)

Oh. My. Goodness. Please tell me this is going to be a series. A duology. A trilogy. Anything. It can't just end like that. A fast-paced quick read, Violet City is a pleasant surprise. I went in with no expectations and they were blown out of the sky.

Violet City reminded me of Amid Stars and Darkness, The Sound of Stars, and The First 7. We start out with aliens, called Volkranian, invading Earth while Penelope (Pen) is on a school field trip in New York City. Penelope barely escapes and immediately runs into 'Rowan' who happens to be one of the aliens. Of course, they both continue to run into their own trouble and have to rely on each other to survive. There's pining. There's rebellion. There's secrets. There's betrayal. There's hope. Violet City is a Scifi story that kept me up, reading, way past my bedtime.

***Thank you to Netgalley and Books Go Social for providing me with a review copy.***

This came off as a refreshing dystopian-meets-alien YA story. The main character was young but not totally naive, although there’s definitely some holes in her history that I’m intrigued to fill. There was a dashing male counterpart to the main character, full of bonus angst and mystery. The plot was fast-paced, and the entire story was a quick read (about half a day for me).

Loved:
-This wasn’t a typical alien love story OR a dystopian love story - a combo I can’t say I’ve come across before in YA.
-It doesn’t follow the standard formula expected, and the curveballs thrown were fun and kept me intrigued!
-It’s a quick read; I’d almost want more in the one book, but for the target audience it’s perfect. It remains to be seen if that pattern continues - if this series goes beyond 4-5 books, this detail would become a ‘meh’ for me.

Meh:
-Writing-wise, this story didn’t seem to quite make up its mind; it mainly targets a younger YA age group, but there’s random spice (like, bell pepper, not full cayenne) inappropriate for a 12-15 year old audience.
-This writer has room to grow stylistically in this genre, for sure, but there’s a lot of potential.
-It moved almost too fast; some plot points did seem thrown in just to take the reader around a quick corner, and I’d reread parts to see how/what/why the changes happened...but some were superficial at best.

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“Emotions cannot come into play when the survival of a species is at risk. Only instinct and necessity.”
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Stars: 3/5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Sorry, I didn't realize how young the audience was for this book when I requested it. Within a few pages I could tell it was not for me. Also, not sure why everyone was pointing their dead cellphone at the overhanging spaceship.

I want to thank Netgalley, Page Morgan, and Books Go Social for giving me a chance to read this book in exchange for an honest review.

I will talk about the characters first; Pen is a smart character. I was skeptical at first when she said that she's the kind of character who rationalizes everything and as I read further I kind of hoping that she really does rationalize. And it did not disappoint. She's actually rational even in the moments that scare her. Even when their whole world is ending she still find a solution to her problems. She's not like the other protagonist that is smart but then their emotions get ahead of them. But Pen doesn't like that, she consider first what she wants and what is needed or right. I like also how she asks questions about almost everything in this book. As for Rowan, he is so adorable. He's this kind of character that is serious and mysterious but he is also innocent in his own way. I think the chemistry of Pen and Rowan is so enjoyable to read. And their relationship is properly developed.

One thing I like reading in this book is how the author wrote the proper reaction of people in shock when death is in front of them. For example when Pen saw someone that is dead she has a reaction of what a person react in real life when they see a dead body. I think this kind of writing is important because I don't see reactions like these in a post-apocalyptic world books. Also, the sarcasm and humor in this book is really on point.

As i'm going further into the book it is becoming more interesting because you can't clearly tell who is the real enemy. You don't know whose character you should trust or not, beside Rowan and Pen.

For the things that i'm having difficulty with the book, i'm having a hard time picturing each scene the characters are in because most of the words are so sci-fi-y although not to the point that you will not get what is happening. Also one of the thing that this book is lacking of is the plot not being properly developed. I feel like it is so rush. I'm a little underwhelmed with the political aspect. I can see this book is just really focusing on the romance trope.

Overall, I rated this book 4 out of 5 star. Although this book lack some plot development, the chemistry and romance between the two main character are so enjoyable to read. Also this book is a quick read. So if you want some light and easy read, I recommend this book to you!

i found this book to be fun and entertaining! the angst and yearning between rowan and pen was very satisfying to watch as well. the open ending only made it all the more intriguing. i am however concerned as a reader and reviewer as to the kind of message it sends to have the colonization and invasion of the human world more or less succeed at the end of this book even though i appreciate the themes of rebellion and realism being conveyed. while entertaining, it was extremely concerning to see the invading forces of this story turn out to be victorious and in the eyes of the story, in the right.

I'm not quite sure how to feel about this book

I loved the concept - an alien invasion/romance plot? I'm in!

We follow high school student Penelope as her home city in New York is invaded by, you guessed it, aliens. We are thrown right into the action from the very first page. Penelope is eventually thrust into a plotline with Rowan - an alien invader, thus ensues the romance plot. This is where my first issue arose.

Penelope is a high school student - a minor. She describes Rowan as looking 20 years old but as an alien who can be sure how old he actually is, this made me a little uncomfortable. If I read the book pretending Penelope was older, then the romance was lovely but, she isn't written this way and that felt off throughout the book.

Pacing. This book was action-packed from the first page till almost the last - which in an alien invasion feels accurate, however, the story was so fast-paced it almost felt rushed? There were little moments within the book that I wish could have been expanded upon instead of rushing to the next beat.

Overall I enjoyed the read and am interested to see how Penelope matures in the next book

I received an ARC from the author via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

I picked up Violet City due to remembering the author from our brief interactions during Entangled Publishing’s Historical FB group parties (she also writes historical romance for them as Angie Morgan, although I actually haven’t read any of those books yet). The book also sounded pretty interesting.

Stylistically, this book seems to struggle to figure out what it wants to be, and while I can’t speak to her past work, I feel like it reflects my first impression of all her author identities mixed together. It’s primarily trying to be YA, but it also feels a bit like it’s trying to skew younger (upper middle grade/younger side of YA), while also wanting to be a bit sexy, including a steamy scene. That’s not to say YA can’t be a bit steamy (even if it isn’t full-on ACOTAR-explicit, which this isn’t), but the writing and the content choices suggested different things at times.

Yet, there are some good elements here. I don’t read a ton of alien-oriented romance (a lot of it sounds a bit too out there for me), and I liked what was included here, although it wasn’t as prominent as I expected based on the premise.

The characters are fun, although not overly remarkable. I did like Pen and that she did have real teenage concerns, like about her mother, in the midst of this crisis. And I did want more development for Rowan, but the romance itself was sweet overall.

This is a fun story, although perhaps not the best intro to Page Morgan’s work overall. I’ll definitely be looking for more of her work to try across her different pen names. I’ll also keep an eye on this series, as while it’s very flawed, it has a lot of potential. And I think if you’re looking for a fun YA alien/dystopian romance, this is a pretty solid effort that is worth giving a try.

I had a weird conundrum when trying to settle on a star rating for this book. I couldn't decide whether to give it 2 stars or 4! I'm going to give it three stars to fit in between the two star ratings that I was deciding between, but I have so many mixed feelings about this book...

I requested this book on NetGalley simply because I saw that it was about an alien invasion. Alien invasions are sort of my jam. However, this book wasn't entirely what I'd expected or hoped for. The alien part of this story filled my craving for an alien book, but it didn't feel very unique. It followed a very typical alien invasion romance plot. I almost wished there would be more unique features to this book that would make it stand out more.

The writing style was also not for me. The content of this book was young adult including a steamy scene, but the writing style was middle grade and bordering on children's. The writing felt almost naive and childish yet the content was very much appropriate for a teenager or adult. It was a weird combination that I was not a huge fan of.

However, all that being said, the romance in this book is what really carried the book for me. It felt like insta-love at first but it grew into a sweet romance with lots of chemistry. I loved the two lovers together and how innocent yet loving they both were. I'm very eager to read the next book once it comes out and see where the romance goes. This is the first book that I've read by Page Morgan and I can already tell that she's really good at writing amazing romances that make you root for the couple.

This was one of the most unexpected reads of this month.

I'm not normally a big fan of Sci-Fi history's but I couldn't stop reading it... It was fast-paced, action-packed but easy to read. I actually read the book in about 2 days, picking it up as soon as I had free time.

With enemies to lover romance in between a "aliens are taking over the earth" plot the book kept me captivated with the "just one more chapter" feeling.

Really recommend this book and will be definitely reading more books by this author.