Why I Love Wednesdays: Favorite Series

Why I Love Wednesdays is a weekly meme hosted by Alexis at Reflections of a Bookaholic. Every Wednesday, she discusses a different literary topic. The topic this week is your favorite book series.

Why I Love . . . The Darkest Powers Trilogy by Kelley Armstrong

I was tempted to write about Twilight for this post because it is the only series that I have read numerous times, but I've had Darkest Powers on the brain lately. I've been dying to reread it, but I am one of those people who plan out (or try to plan out) which books I'll be reading months ahead of time, and I am booked solid until February (a lot of this has to do with the Fall/Winter challenge I partake in every year in my College Students group on Goodreads--see the Challenges page above). So, I won't be rereading this series until at least next Spring.

I think Chloe is one of the greatest heroines in young adult literature, mainly because she's so real. She's barely five feet tall, has hair problems, stutters when she's nervous, and she has a very realistic reaction when she discovers that she can see ghosts--she freaks. And even though Chloe isn't as kick-ass as Rose Hathaway in Vampire Academy, she's not a damsel-in-distress either. She takes control and ends up being the leader of the group (or at least she switches off being alpha and beta with Derek), partly because she's the most powerful of everyone else, though that also causes a lot of problems for her, such as bringing corpses to life without even trying.

I also love Chloe and Derek's relationship. For one thing, Derek is not the typical heartthrob love interest, but instead he's described as having bad acne and body odor, both being side effects of his gradual change to a werewolf which causes his hormones to get out of control during puberty.  He's also described as being Superman strong, a science/math genius, and a person who puts his family and friends' well-being ahead of his own. I thought he was quite swoon-worthy myself, even if he wasn't male model gorgeous. I love him because of his personality. True, he can be a bit too overprotective and domineering at times, but Chloe holds her own against him. Chloe and Derek have a love/hate relationship for the majority of the trilogy, and I love their bantering. In the third book, the scenes when they both start admitting their feelings for one another make up some of the sweetest moments of the series.