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Author:
Thomm Quackenbush
Genre:
Contemporary Fantasy/Paranomal Fiction
Book
Rating: 7
Personal
rating:7
There
is so much in me screaming to say ‘man I
loved this book’ but I just can’t. It
had more than a heaping handful of the makings of a perfect 11 out of ten but
it just didn’t come together right. Kind
of like eating a pie that has all the right ingredients of excellence yet
somehow still tastes like an average pie though it really shouldn’t. That’s kind of how I felt reading this
book. Like it was teetering on the edge
of going somewhere but plateaued somewhere in the first quarter of the book and
stayed on going somewhere right up till the end and then leaped into somewhere
with me thinking, there’s still way to many unanswered questions here even if
this is the first in a series.
The
heroine, Shane, seems like your typical girl.
Nothing too special or unspecial.
Just normal. She’s madly in love
with Elliott. And that’s about it. I couldn’t really get into her. She’s supposed to be oh so depressed about
losing him but really just seems to pine for him in an obsessive way instead of
genuinely missing him. And crying over
him. And not making friends with people
because she’s just lost without him.
There wasn’t enough there. Then
there was her best friend in collage. Roslyn.
The sultry Wiccan. She was
entertaining, dated a wannabe vampire boyfriend and that was about it for her
too. Her depth kind of stayed in that
realm of I’m a which who likes sex, boys who think they are vamps and Shane is
my Besty.
The
supposed villain, honestly I wasn’t sure if he was indeed bad or evil. Okay that’s not entirely true, I was sure
Gideon was the bad guy, but there was no real evidence. As far as I knew Girl could’ve been the bad
one. Again I just sort of knew she
wasn’t. To a degree anyway. But the book
seemed to be more about this game Gideon and Girl had going on and ultimately
Shane who is the main character spent most of the book ignoring their advice
and trying to figure out how to bring her dead ex back to life.
Gideon,
well he was fun to read but ultimately didn’t have nearly enough info on him to
connect like with Shane and Roselyn.
There isn’t much I can do as a reader without the why. Keep secrets by all means but there has to be
some sort of why or end goal we are going for.
Nothing he did seemed to lend itself to helping her get out of the limbo
between dead and alive. He just barked
orders out at her, and trained Shane somehow to just get beat up. As far as I can tell she learned no self defense
and was just as helpless at the beginning of the book as she was the end.
Roselyn. More of the same. I would’ve liked to get into more of her as a
wiccan, more into her as an artist, more into what drove her as a person. But none of these things got to deep. In fact when Shane got stuck in limbo and Roselyn
was the only one who could see her I got a bit excited. Oh there must be something special about
her. And nope. The only thing special about her is that she
could still see Shane. Nothing more to
report.
Virgil
and his friends. The three of them think
Shane has come to the college to get them.
As far as I know she didn’t believe in the supernatural or spells. She was quite neutral about it all. Anyone with half a brain who did their
research would have known. Following her
around going to places her ex had been before he met her and assuming she’s
performing some counter magic of some kind was the biggest leap I’ve seen in a
while. After highschool kids go to
college. She did well enough to get in
on a full scholarship so she earned her way in.
Just like any normal student.
Unless she was flying on magic carpets and summoning demons assuming she
was out to get you, especially since she doesn’t even know who you are is ridiculous.
And
girl. Maybe I’m losing my mind here but
she was the only thing in this novel that made absolute sense. She could adjust memories, play with time a
bit. Make you remember or forget things. She was trapped in the school by some unknown
magic force, and even with the power over memories she had no idea who she was
and was trying to remember. And most
importantly she was not insane.
Everything she said made sense yet no one understood her. One point she constantly made was in order
for Shane to get her life back she had to do the things she would’ve normally
done. She had to act like she was alive
even though no one could see her or she would eventually cease to exist for
real. It was obvious even with her kooky
misplaced dialogue that that was the point.
It was far from difficult to decipher. And it made both Roselyn and
Shane look a bit stupid that they couldn’t get it.
Then
there was the speech she gave Shane when asked who she was. In a nut shell she said why does where I come
from matter. If she was an alien, an AI,
or a ladybug, what mattered is that she was here now to help Shane get back
into the human realm and that was what she should focus on. In the midst of this spiel she draw as an
example what if she was Australian.
Shane after the speech was over said “your from Australia”. I wanted to scream. How could you miss the point that she’s
trying to tell you stop focusing on her origins and focus on you getting your
real life back. Shane’s amazing ability
to miss the points of what both Girl, bar far my favorite character, and
Gideon, entertaining if flat and annoying, tried to tell her. Her job was to listen and focus on being a
real girl again. Instead she persisted
in trying to find ways to bring Elliot back to life.
And
the other thing about this novel was three incidents, one of a man who gets
turned into a merchant of death, another about a boy who gets his sins permanently
tatted on his body and another about Elliot’s Ex girlfriend Ashley. All three of this got a few pages maybe a
whole chapter for the Ashley and tattoo man because they shared the
chapter. These things, though very very
cool, did nothing to propel Shane’s story.
In fact I’m still mulling over why even bother with it at all. Especially the Ashley and Tattoo guy
bit. It was fun to read but it didn’t
come back as a real plot point. Just
added pages. Just something else cool
for the author to throw into the novel.
And
lastly I was put of quite a bit by the emphasis on virgins. Who cares if the girls or the boys where each
others first. Just enough with the virgins
and virgin sacrifice and more importantly the need to mention it enough times
for me not to forget it. I also read
part two and this virgin thing was more annoying over there. Also I’m not down for how the women are so
helpless. They are the heroes and are
more than ill equipped to live in a world of demons and other supernatural
things. In fact if they got into a fight
with a human I doubt they would win.
It’s like they are damsels in distress and their male counterparts are
even weaker than they are. Even though
it never happened the book read like one of those novels where a man was going
to swoop in and save the day at some point.
I
guess that was my problem. Shane pretty
much ended up being your typical ‘I just want to be Shane’ even after being
thrown into a world that only she can keep the balance of at the moment and she
just doesn’t care. Let evil destroy
everyone I just want to be a normal girl.
Ugh. Why do they always do
this. For once it would be refreshing for
someone to want to be normal but still understand they can’t be. Denial causes problems and turning a blind
eye when things go wrong, which I know they will in book two, is just
selfish. Girl even flat out tells her
she will never be just Shane again, so Does Gideon before the end. Yet she’s still harping over a normal
life.
I
felt the same about Gideon. He kept
trying to force her to embrace some role that only he seemed to know about, and
I could not figure out because there were no real clues laid out. Just floating in space knowing this was going
to be one of those no clue type of books where all is revealed in the last ten
pages to hopefully make you feel awesome about knowing nothing the whole book. And naturally ten pages is far from enough to
tie up the ends that should end in this book so they clearly got pushed into
book two.
Roselyn. I had hope for her when she teamed up with
the wimpy Virgil, he had the same level of manliness as her boyfriend,
zero. And was to psychologically connected
to his roommate in a creepy yeah you’re gay even though you say you aren’t kind
of way. But she didn’t really learn
much. They found this book that I’m still
totally clueless about but everyone seemed to want (oh and I read the second
book still no clue what the fuss is about this book) she was somehow drawn to
hunt down items throughout the campus, but once she had them I don’t remember
her handing them over to anyone. I just
assumed I’d missed it or girl wiped her memory of such things when she took
them from her. Who knows. She basically came out at the end the same
woman she was in the beginning. Just
like Shane.
Then
there was Girl. There are way way WAY
too many awesome tings I can say about her.
She was by far the most developed driven and deep character in the whole
book. And the only one who came out
different at the end. The only one whose
happy I felt and whose sadness I felt and anger I believed instead of was annoyed
by like Shane. Shane always came off as
a whiny child who refused to follow orders because she was smarter than everyone
and had to do it her way. Girl had a
purpose to save Shane, and to remember who she was which was why she was so
vague about giving her name. She didn’t
know and you could relate to the crisis of not knowing who you were and hating
the person, Gideon I assume, who trapped and stole that from her. And in the end when she supposedly wasn’t insane
anymore, her ability to make sense out of everything stayed true to the last
page. And even then when Shane asked
what she was up to and accused her of keeping secrets, Girl once again had to
remind her that she had her own journey to follow. She wasn’t the Shane she was before, and what
Girl herself was up to was immaterial to Shane’s journey. It just baffles me how many times she tells Shane
this and she never gets it. Even in the
end. Girl was the best thing all up and
over in this book as far as the characters and good character development was concerned. She was just brilliant. In Sea of main
characters that floated, she swam.
And
another good paragraph, this book was cool.
Demons, and wraths, and all sorts of other names for things that I still
don’t know what they are without a dictionary, were everywhere. The concept of being here, but not here and
having to act like you are here in order to be fully here again was a good
one. There were enough funny bits of
very clever dialogue to almost drown the annoying stuff. A love interest that ended only because Shane
is just stupid was a nice section as well.
The dialogue during Shane’s training was always interesting though for
someone so smart she always failed to see the obvious inner meaning in Gideon’s
words. This book just seemed like with a
little more action, more character development and a lot less wining on Shane
and the men in the novels part, this book would’ve been better than
awesome. In fact, though I think it’s
not that great, I would bet my life this book is cool enough, and imaginative
enough to get a serious following. It
has just the right dose of all the good stuff for people who just want light
entertaining reading to enjoy. And there
are a lot of those people out there.
So
would I recommend this book. Yes. Is it for me, no. Do I even think it's good, not really. But I’d be lying if I said this book didn’t
read like the type of book that would become amazingly popular and leave people
like me thinking it was okay but not that awesome. This book is that kind of novel. It was just confusing and none of the plot points seemed to drive it anywhere. They just came at me like additional factoids lost on the breeze. It would probably be the type of book made
into a movie and be better, kind of how I feel about LOTR. The concept is brilliant, people will love
it, but it was a tedious read, that’s how I feel about both. This book is more than worth the read just
because, stereotypical virgin stuff and I wanna be normal girl stuff aside, it
was quite satisfying in an imaginative I do want to see more of how this
authors brain ticks kind of way. I may
not give it five stars but I don’t think this book needs them the story is
catchy enough to succeed regardless of my not so good opinion of it. Hell I wrote four word document pages so clearly
it made an impression on me. And that’s
what any good book should do. I just wish the changing of tense was more fluid, and the new strange book wasn't introduced at all if it wasn't going to be developed, and, well if it just had a clear more defined direction. Other than that as a first in a series it read more like a laying of the ground work to be tied up in book two than an actual stand alone grand opening.
Author: Erik Nelson
