Review: Exile by Rebecca Lim

Exile by Rebecca Lim


My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars

Synopsis from Goodreads:
An electric combination of angels, mystery and romance, EXILE is the breathtaking sequel to MERCY in a major new paranormal romance series.

Mercy’s search continues ...

Mercy is an angel with a shattered memory, exiled from heaven for a crime she can’t remember committing.
So when she ‘wakes’ inside the body and life of eighteen-year-old Lela Neill, Mercy has only limited recall of her past life. Her strongest memories are of Ryan, the mortal boy who’d begun to fall for her – and she for him.
Mercy soon discovers that circumstances have forced Lela into waitressing at the Green Lantern, a busy city café frequented by suits, cab drivers, strippers, backpackers and the homeless, while caring for her terminally ill mother.
Just as Mercy is adjusting to Lela’s life, her beloved, Luc, reappears in her dreams, and she begins to glimpse her true nature and true feelings for Ryan. What she does not know is that her attempts to contact Ryan may have explosive consequences for everyone around her.
Meanwhile, ‘the Eight’ — the angelic beings responsible for her banishment — remain determined to keep Mercy and Luc apart, forever

Book 2 in the Mercy series
Mercy is a being who is continually dropped into another person's life for an unknown length of time, usually until she can sort out some problem in that person's life. This time, she finds herself in the body of a depressed and angry girl, forced to quit university to care for her dying mother, and working in a coffee shop in a rough area of town. It takes Mercy a lot longer to adapt to this new body, because she has no clue where she has to go for work, or who anybody is, and has to continually make up excuses for her sudden memory loss. The people all around her are rude and harrassed, and Lela's life is a very depressing one, with no glimmer of hope in her future. She does find a way to get in contact with Ryan again, from her previous life as Carmen, and arranges to meet up with him- but will he manage to get there in time?


I thought that this was better than book 1 Mercy, because some of the ideas behind what Mercy really is, were better developed. She also starts to remember little snippets of what she was before, and some of the angels she used to know in another time. We the reader are slowly fed some clues to her background and the reason behind her situation. Mercy is still visited by the mysterious Luc in her dreams and confused by his cryptic advice about "the Eight". The tension keeps building up and up to a climactic shocker of a finish. This book felt a little darker than the first one simply because it was sadder and there was an underlying hopelessness about it.


I loved the idea of her managing to get in touch with Ryan again, from her new body on the other side of the world. He is the only one who believes her story and sees her for who she really is, but I just didn't get their supposedly epic love. I didn't see that much romance in book 1 (unless I missed it) and I actually thought he spent most of the book being quite mean to her, and only started to like her nearer the end, when they were working together to find out what happened to his sister, and learning to trust each other. I love the idea of these books, and seeing Mercy struggle to cope in each new situation. I look forward to seeing where she will end up next, and to finding out some more about the mystery of her background- who is punishing her and why- and to find out if she will manage to escape the endless cycle forced on her and be able to live her own life.