Soul Mates by LA Weatherly (Soul Mates Trilogy #1)

9/10

How can you miss someone you've never met? This is the premise of Soul Mates, a paranormal romance from the author of the best-selling Angel series, L. A. Weatherly.

Iris and Nate have seen each other in their dreams for most of their lives when, as if by chance, they meet in a house long since left to decay in Los Angeles. When they talk, they find that they were destined to meet, soul mates is exactly what they are, but someone is busy trying to tear them apart. The real question they have to ask themselves is will their love last or will the threat of interference destroy their love forever?

Iris dreams about Nate, seeing him in different outfits from varying periods in history, but she isn't supposed to meet him in real-life. She does however and this is what causes their enemies to rise up. She is a 16-year-old girl who ran away from home when her gran died and she was to be put into care. Low on funds, she ends up in Carlton, New Mexico where she thumbs a lift into Los Angeles and finds a house purely by chance… which is where Nate is.

Their first real meeting doesn't go as well as she had hoped, but there needed to be some sort of conflict to get the story going. With Soul Mates you get a look at the lives of people before they meet, how distant they have become, only being in dreams, never thinking for a minute that they would ever meet.

Readers can see the longing in both characters and the fact they are perfect together, even though there is this external threat. Far from being just a runaway girl, Iris tells Nate why she left the care home, and this has him see her in a different light as she has been able to change her own destiny, even though some might see what she has done as wrong. I could not blame her for leaving the home, as if I was in her shoes I would hope that I could rely on someone else to help me out if I were in her situation.

Iris can't believe her luck that she has found the man of her dreams, but there are some factors that interfere with the story, and it could stop them from ever being together.

I enjoyed L. A. Weatherly's storytelling ability, the ease of being able to read it, and the character development as I read through the book. American born Weatherly is no stranger to novel writing, Child X was her first book and Angel got successful reviews. Her new trilogy is a landmark in her career and if this first book is anything to go by, it should be a great year for her. Soul Mates was originally supposed to be a standalone novel, but Barrington Stoke thought it was worth a trilogy. Part one of a three part series, Soul Desire and Soul Song will be released on May 14 and August 14 of this year (2014).