ARC received through Goodreads FirstReads. 
 Before going into this book, I had one of those unshakeable feelings that I was not going to like it. Forbidden sounded uninspired and unoriginal, with the same regurgitated elements of every other YA paranormal book out today: forbidden love, average paranormalness, seemingly ordinary main character who isn't so ordinary, mysterious love interest, everyone is hot, insta-love attraction. You know, the typical menagerie of bleeh. 
 Within the first chapter, Forbidden was already starting to piss me off. Not a good sign when you're only a few pages into a 400+ page book. 
 In the beginning, we are introduced to Claire Bennett, your seemingly average everyday teenager. Claire lives with her mom in California and has barely stayed anywhere for more than two years. In just the first few pages, I was bombarded with physical attributes of both Claire and her mother. Then when Claire's friends are introduced I felt viciously attacked by everyone's outfit descriptions, letting me know exactly everything that everyone was wearing. And these descriptions weren't even worked into the story very well either. They seemed to be just kind of stuck in there like a blocky piece of unnecessary text. 
 Early on, we are also introduced to the love interest, Alec, a mysterious boy with a swoon-worthy Scottish accent. At first, I wasn't liking Alec much at all. He seemed to be quite bland and I could pick up nothing special about him other than his mysterious personal history. But more on him later. 
 Pretty quickly, I was able to pick up on the writing style as well. It all came across as very juvenile. The dialogue especially seemed very "middle-grade" quality to me and felt very out of place with the rest of the story. 
 The one thing that angered me about this book early on was this one particular scene. I was truly infuriated and this was when I firmly decided that I did not like this book. In the scene, Claire is frustrated at her mom because she is apprehensive about Claire's interest in dating. 
 "I'm sixteen, Mom. Of course I want to date. Not that I've ever even had a boy look at me yet. But I hope it's gonna happen. And just because I'm now physically able to get pregnant, it doesn't mean I'm gonna end up a high school dropout with a newborn and a guy who ditches me - like you did!" 
 My first reaction: What a bitch! Who talks to their mom like that? But I think what angered me even more was that her mom doesn't even say anything or get angry in the slightest. I know that if I ever spoke to my mom like that I would have had my ass handed to me without hesitation. 
 So moving on, Claire attends school and it's the first day of the new school year. Now in real life, teachers never assign five page papers on the first day of class. At least in my experience, this never once happened. But apparently in juvenile YA books this does happen. And it annoys the shit out of me. 
 At this point in the book I was barely even 100 pages in and I was already purposely trying to find more and more excuses to hate this book. And what do you know, I was presented with more! 
 After school in the parking lot, Claire and her friends are walking when a scaffolding falls and is about to crush them all. Alec swoops in and curiously enough stops the scaffolding from falling, giving him enough time to push Claire and her friends out of the way. Reading this, I had an overwhelming sense like I've read something like this before somewhere...ahem... *cough* Twilight *cough cough*. Way to go, Alec. Total Edward Cullen move there. 
 As the story progressed though, I felt that Alec was starting to grow on me. I preferred reading the chapters that were told in his perspective more than those that were told from Claire's point of view. I began to genuinely like his character and I found him to be one of the redeeming qualities (if not the only redeeming quality) of this book. But just when I started to like Alec, he totally went into creeper mode. He waits for Claire to get home...in her bedroom...in the dark...and he only reveals himself right before she undresses. And Claire is somehow okay with this. What. The actual. Fuck. 
 After that, I just wanted to finish this thing as quickly as possible. I had to surf through whole clusters of pages of massive info dump about angels, Grigori, and half bloods, but at this point I could have cared less about all of it. 
 Even though the book definitely ends seeming like it could produce a series of sequels, I'm glad to see (so far) that there aren't going to be any. 
 So overall, Forbidden is not particularly inventive or original. But if you want a rather mindless, just-for-kicks-read, then maybe give it a shot. Who knows, it could just be your cup of tea, it just wasn't mine.