Finders Keepers by Annalisa Gulbrandsen

Synopsis from Amazon:

Nothing could be more horrifying than being stuck in a thrift shop trying on wedding dresses for your mother, except possibly being attacked and nearly abducted by a creature whose eyes flash yellow-green in the dark.

Sixteen-year-old Ellie Brown inadvertently stirs up the interest of a secret society of goblins living underneath her small, mining town when she rescues not a wild crow, but the future goblin king.

The goblin community is out to get her and it doesn’t seem to matter if she’s dead or alive. The only person trying to protect her is a blue-eyed childhood friend named Sky, who, in spite of not having seen him in eleven years, seems unnaturally familiar to Ellie. But it’s his polar opposite brother, one whose intentions aren’t quite as honorable, that threatens to steal her heart.

Writing a synopsis is hard. I can attest to this. Sometimes it feels like it’s harder than writing the book itself. This synopsis doesn’t do the book justice, but it did get me to purchase it so I guess it did its job.

This book was an unexpected gem hidden in the Amazon Indie rough. I believe it used to have a different cover, one that shows up on the inside of the book. Either that or it was posted elsewhere because I remember seeing this other cover and passing it up because it was very amateur looking which made me think the book probably was also. I’m really glad the author changed the cover because I might not have given it a chance if not for the new cover.

It does start with the main character Ellie in a thrift store trying on a wedding dress. The action starts in that thrift store and is pretty consistent from there on out.

What I liked about this book:

It wasn’t your typical YA paranormal/fantasy characters. Trolls! How cool. Someone asked me are they the scary trolls or the Amanda Hocking type trolls. I haven’t read the Amanda Hocking troll books so I can’t honestly make a comparison but I think there were a little of both in this book.

I also liked that it wasn’t your typical YA characters. It wasn’t the new kid in town drawn to the hottest boy in school or the hot new boy that shows up and is drawn to the dumpy/plain/shy girl that no one likes/pays attention to. The character had deep roots in the town as did all the characters.

The last thing that I really liked was that you weren’t really sure who was the good guy or the bad guy and I wasn’t entirely sure how things were going to pan out.

There were of course little things of course that I could point out, but I won’t because to be honest they were minimal and the story was very well written and for an Indie very well edited. I usually prefer first person narration for my young adult novels but the author did such a wonderful job that I wasn’t aware of the POV after the first couple of pages. Plainly stated, the story had heart.

My only complaint is, after I was finished with the book I wanted to know if there would be a sequel and to twitter/blog stalk the author as I do with many authors whose books I like, but I was unable to find anything except a bio on Authonomy.com.

I would give this book 4.5 stars if any of the sites I’ll be posting the review on had that option. Since they don’t I’m rounding it up to 5 stars because I was unable to finish the last two Indie books I attempted. So, this book gets a bonus half star for not only being good enough to finish but good enough for me to really like.

Get your copy here:

(you know you want it!)