The Never Prayer

Aaron Michael
Ritchey
ISBN Number: 
978-1937254414
Genre: 
Young Adult

Paranormal/Urban Fantasy

Devastated by the brutal death of her parents and left to raise her three-year old brother Jozey, high school student Lena Marquez is spiraling downward into the world of drugs and danger just to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads.  Jozey’s love is the only thing that keeps Lena sane. But the life she is accepting in order to keep Jozey is the very same life that might destroy him.  

Just as Lena is about to lose everything she has struggled so hard to hold, two new students show up at school. One is brooding and tattered, the other handsome and charismatic.  Both keep popping up at times of greatest need, both seem to know things she tells no one.  As circumstances quickly start falling apart, the realm between humanity and heaven becomes tangled between good and evil, lust and love. Lena must choose which friends she can trust and which ones will ultimately destroy her soul.

This is one of those rare books that is extremely hard to review objectively.  It’s dark, it’s twisted, it deals with harsh subjects, cold realities and tragic circumstances yet it is published as a young adult book.  It’s about young adults, in the darkest of situations dealing with the harshest  parts of life. Nothing is particularly happy in this novel. No one is painted as “good” or “bad”, yet in every single character there is someone we all know, a point that is universal in nature - and a truth that, while hard to swallow, is real,  leaving the moral of the story ambiguous but ultimately good.

TJ Mackay