Rebel Belle - Rachel Hawkins (2014)

3.5 stars

I bought this book because it sounded like it would be heaps of fun to read, and I was pretty right in my assumption.

This book is told from Harper's persective, she is a southern belle obsessed with cotillion and dances and is very unlike me so I think it's pretty amazing that I still loved reading her perspective considering the strong possiblity she had to be annoying. I found this book surprisingly hard to put down and even though I thought it would predictable, at times it definitely wasn't and I always wanted to know how everything would turn out so it kept my interest. My favourite character was David, there's not even a question. Asides from my weakness for the love interest, I thought he was probably the most relatable character in the book and I found the parts of the book without him a lot less interesting then the parts he was in. I would recommend this book to people who liked The Selection or people who like a girly heroine.

Harper Price is about to be crowned homecoming queen when she goes to the bathroom to put on lip gloss and is given the powers of a paladin from the janitor after he is murdered. She kills his murderer with the heel of her shoe and her new apparent strength and agility. She eventually learns that she is a paladin, a guard to the oracle who she learns is her childhood nemesis David Stark. His aunt Saylor explains that she is a mage also assigned to protect David as male oracles can be extraordinarily powerful and the last one was the one who created the paladin in the first place. They soon find the other mage, Blythe, who is crazy and wants to do a ritual that will make David super powerful and crazy like the last male oracle and David has a vision that shows that everything will go down at cotillion. Blythe manages to put a spell on the punch at cotillion so everyone who drinks it wants to kill Harper so she has to knock out many of her family and friends before she can get to David. She is too late and Blythe has already performed the ritual so David is supercharged and has accidentally turned all the debutantes into paladin. Blythe goes to leave with David but he refuses so she takes Bee, Harper's best friend who was just turned into a paladin, with her. David removes the powers from the rest of the girls and they go downstairs to find Ryan, Harper's ex, with Saylor's dead body. He tells her that she transferred her powers over to him before she died, meaning he has to work with Harper to protect David, who she just broke up with him for.