Book Series Review: Incarnate, Asunder, Infinite by Jodi Meadows

Title: Incarnate, Asunder, Infinite (Newsoul #1, #2, #3)
Author: Jodi Meadows
Publisher: Katherine Tegen Books
Publishing Date: January 31st 2012, January 29th 2013, January 28th 2014
Length: 374 pages, 406 pages, 418 pages
Keywords: YA, fiction, fantasy, romance, reincarnation, music
Source: Bought, Publisher

New soul

Ana is new. For thousands of years in Range, a million souls have been reincarnated over and over, keeping their memories and experiences from previous lifetimes. When Ana was born, another soul vanished, and no one knows why.

No soul

Even Ana’s own mother thinks she’s a nosoul, an omen of worse things to come, and has kept her away from society. To escape her seclusion and learn whether she’ll be reincarnated, Ana travels to the city of Heart, but its citizens are afraid of what her presence means. When dragons and sylph attack the city, is Ana to blame?

Heart

Sam believes Ana’s new soul is good and worthwhile. When he stands up for her, their relationship blooms. But can he love someone who may live only once, and will Ana’s enemies—human and creature alike—let them be together? Ana needs to uncover the mistake that gave her someone else’s life, but will her quest threaten the peace of Heart and destroy the promise of reincarnation for all?

Summary by Goodreads

 

New soul, no soul, reincarnation. You see, the concept and meaning of the essence of a human being, the characteristics, the emotions, the memories that define a person, are a very prominent and recurring theme in Jodi Meadows NEWSOUL three-book series. Numerous discussions about and unsettling discoveries of a godlike being and the temple in the city's center are inevitably connected with Ana's efforts to find the origin and reason behind the reincarnation of Heart's one million souls. Conflicts of various forms resulting from the idea of God Janan were fast becoming parts of the story I would've wished to skip altogether instead of reading even more about them from the first to the last book.

With Ana, Jodi Meadows introduces us to a main character whose journey has only just begun. Her upbringing was anything but kind and loving and so Ana is someone who doesn't easily trust and love. Ana is a delicate, yet strong character and hers is a story of significant emotional development. How could it be different, the bonds of friendship and Ana's love story with Sam, her beloved musician, were my main reason and motivation to finish the series as a whole.

When I look back at the entire series, more than thousand pages worth of story, I don't have the impression that very much happened beside the main conflicts with Janan, sylph, new soul opposers and dragons. Characters were likely to be followed in their repetitive quests. In addition the story's overall ending was one of the most anticlimatic I have encountered in a dystopian novel. 

Phoenixes, dragons, sylphs, reincarnation, the God of souls. There are many different things to be discovered in Jodi's fantasy world. The world map had so many incredible possibilities and enticements like the mentioned jungle, islands, the ocean, but they were left unexplored in the end. 

Notes, melodies, music. They are the heart of Jodi Meadow's trilogy. Music is always something that's very hard for me to work with in a story. Books with affinity for music are often those that don't enchant me as much as they could. Ana and Sam are practicing all the time, talking about music, learning new instruments, composing new songs. Their lives are so centered around it that their characters are irrevocably linked with the music inside them. It defines them and who they are or want to be. Beside the people in their lives, music is the most important thing for them. Something I just couldn't be as enthusiastic about as they are, creating a slight discrepancy between the characters, story and me. Even so I'm sure many people will like this series especially for its great musical finesse, for its many songs and moments of euphony and friendship.

3/5 *** NEWSOUL series - A colorful, melodic dreamland of souls and magical creatures for music aficionados. A YA symphony slightly dissonant for me. 

The NEWSOUL series is different and doesn't follow the same patterns of action that other standard YA novels do. Jodi Meadows came up with a very unique concept of reincarnation and invited us to her wide and wild, beautiful and dangerous, dark and multicolored world. In the end her explanation for the enternal reincarnation process of souls, the godlike being of Janan and the temple were a bit too far fetched for me. I missed many adventurous chapters that could've been waiting for our characters out there exploring the world outside of Heart instead. I'll be waiting for Jodi's next project, THE ORPHAN QUEEN, to throw me off my feet then.

"I wasn't reborn. I was five when I first realized how different that made me. It was the spring equinox in the Year of Souls: Soul Night, when the others traded stories about things they'd done three lifetimes ago. Ten lives. Twenty. Battles against dragons, developing the first laser pistol, and Cris's four-life quest to grow a perfect blue rose, only for everyone to declare it was purple. 

[...]

Everyone else rememberd a hundred lifetimes before this one. I had to know why I couldn't. 

"Who am I?" My first spoken words.

"No one," she said. "Nosoul."" ―  p. 5-6

the NEWSOUL series you might enjoy the INCARNATION duology by Avery Williams. THE ALCHEMY OF FOREVER and THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF TOMORROW are very great reads and are about a different concept of reincarnation and the use of alchemy.

* Don't miss Sam's novella, PHOENIX OVERTURE!

* Read an excerpt of INCARNATE here.

* Click here to watch the INCARNATE book trailer.

* For more information about Jodi and her books visit www.jodimeadows.com.

* Thanks to Harper Collins International for sending me a copy of INFINITE for review!