Incarnate

Incarnate by Jodi Meadows (Newsoul #1)
★★★★☆

NEWSOUL
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.
NOSOUL
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?


Wow. That’s my reaction to this one. First off, I just love the whole reincarnation thing - the idea that it didn’t matter what body a person had. Way to go, Jodi Meadows. Not to mention, it’s executed near-perfectly, which, to be honest, is the best you’ll get from me.  I love the concept of  Heart, and the role the city itself plays in Ana’s story. I love the characters, because there are those I like, those I hate, and those I don’t know about. I love that this book has a GINORMOUS amount of subtext, and that subtext raises important questions and makes great arguments in a very subtle way. And then I love Ana herself; while she certainly has many flaws, like all humans do, she has a bunch of ingenious qualities, one of them being: Ana knows the difference between bravery and stupidity. 
I think that with Incarnate being set in a sort of alternate world, a whole lot could’ve gone wrong that didn’t. I wasn’t crazy about the beginning of the book, only because Meadows does a lot of telling-not-showing, but she does get better with that the further in you get, and the plot starts off right away. Every paragraph in this book either moves the plot along or reveals something about a character. Jodi Meadows, I applaud you.

---