The Guardian Touchstone Book 2
Paranormal Romance-Young Adult
Harmony Ink Press
November 26, 2019
256
Sequel to The Touchstone
Superpowered teen Sam, and his boyfriend, Harry, are already struggling to navigate being gifted in a normal world, and their problems are about to get deadlier.
Their oldest enemy, Caleb Reed, will stop at nothing to capture Sam and force him to use his abilities for Reed’s benefit. Though their team of friends and allies steps up to watch their backs, Reed sneaks past their defenses time and time again, leading Sam to wonder if one of their own has betrayed them.
When Reed threatens the life of a friend, Sam is forced to make the most difficult decision of his life—one with consequences he can’t even imagine.
Review By….Sherry Perkins….Member of the Paranormal Romance Review Team
“Sometimes Sam Riley found it hard to tell where his nightmares ended and the new day began.”—The Guardian
I don’t read a lot of Teen or Young Adult fiction. I like it just fine, except I tend to favor books having more mature themes and characters. However, with the plethora of young supernatural heroes coming into their underdeveloped or hidden talent books, it’s hard not to find one or two YA novels somewhere on my bookshelf.
MC Lee has more than a few YA stories to her credit. She’s on my bookshelf. There are two in her “The Touchstone” series, of which “The Guardian” is Book 2, and there are several books in “The Center” series with clever titles such as “You Don’t Know Jack,” “If You Knew Jack,” and “Like I Know Jack.”
Although “The Guardian” is a sequel, there’s enough information about the characters and theme to be able to follow along without first having read “The Touchstone.” “The Guardian” is a bit predictable, but not in an objectionable way.
There are the requisite troubled youngsters, teens, young adults and their guardians or adult surrogates, who not only have to deal with burgeoning supernatural powers and developing relationships, but also with a shadowy government force led by a power-hungry creep who is not above torture to get what he wants. What he wants is Sam Riley, a touchstone, or the most powerful of the gifted ones.
With the touchstone abilities, Sam is coming into latent power and discovering he is more than he imaged he was. He can fly—which is attention getting in any event—but he finds he also has some telepathic abilities and an unnerving ability to bring a kind of homeostasis into a world sorely in need of it. And his boyfriend, Harry, has a gift himself which sets the groundwork for a satisfying “balance” of a different sort by the story’s conclusion.
“A three and a half-star review for a gratifying YA adventure about unharnessed supernatural power, the man who tries to exploit those gifted with that power and the role love plays in the resistance against him.”