Nameless by Lili St. Crow

Nameless:
When Camille was six years old, she was discovered alone in the snow by Enrico Vultusino, godfather of the Seven—the powerful Families that rule magic-ridden New Haven. Papa Vultusino adopted the mute, scarred child, naming her after his dead wife and raising her in luxury on Haven Hill alongside his own son, Nico.

Now Cami is turning sixteen. She’s no longer mute, though she keeps her faded scars hidden under her school uniform, and though she opens up only to her two best friends, Ruby and Ellie, and to Nico, who has become more than a brother to her. But even though Cami is a pampered Vultusino heiress, she knows that she is not really Family. Unlike them, she is a mortal with a past that lies buried in trauma. And it’s not until she meets the mysterious Tor, who reveals scars of his own, that Cami begins to uncover the secrets of her birth…to find out where she comes from and why her past is threatening her now.

I absolutely fell in love with Lili St. Crow's writing style in her Strange Angels series, and was so excited to pick up her next venture in the young adult genre. But be that as it may, I was slightly disappointed. I know and very much appreciate that an author is not going to put out a carbon copy style of the series they wrote before, but I was blown so off kilter with Nameless that I found it hard to regain my balance throughout most of the book. While the tale itself was hauntingly dark, the world was so frustratingly confusing that I had a hard time following just exactly what was going on.  I felt like there almost should have been a story that came before, explaining who and what everyone was.  But I loved the characters. The characters truly drove this story for me, and I instantly became attached to Camille, she was a very different kind of heroine. She believed herself to be a coward, when in fact (to me at least) the exact opposite was true. Nameless is supposed to be a re-telling of the Snow White fairy tale, but the similarities were so well hidden beneath the storytelling that I rarely made the connection. This book had just the right amount of romance to make my heart flutter every once-in-a-while, and the story was rife with tension. So, although I found myself struggling to understand the world and it's counterparts, I loved the dark freshness of Nameless and look forward to more in the Tales of Beauty and Madness series.