Review: Sojourning Souls 2: Eye Spy
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 02 6, 2014
Included at the end of the book is a short story, Sojourning Souls 1: Dead Doughboy Walking.I want to start out by saying that I really have no idea how I should rate this book.  I'm literally back-and-forth in my mind on whether this should receive a 3 or a 4.Let me explain...I'm going to start off with the short story at the end: Dead Doughboy Walking.  Anyone who reads my reviews knows that I am not really a big reader of book descriptions, mainly because some people write WAY TOO MUCH in them and end up giving away too much of the story for me.  (I want to enjoy the book, not wait in anticipation for certain events to occur.)  I skimmed this one on Amazon, though, so when I went to Goodreads to write my review and found that this is actually the second of the series, I was a little shocked.  (I went back and saw that, on Amazon, at the end of the description, it mentions something about the short story at the end being the first one.  I missed that.)  Back to the short story.  Had this story been the first thing that I read, I would not have even considered reading the second book - and, to me, reading the whole series is a big deal.  This didn't feel like the introduction to a series, but instead the backstory to one of the characters.  I actually enjoyed that there was a freebie at the end and that the author had given us more information on that one guy, but now, knowing that it's actually the first in the series, I just feel disappointed.Now, on to the novel ... Have you ever had one of those teachers/professors who used the same word over and over, so much that you concentrated on that word and missed everything else?  (Mine taught Algebra 2 - she said "And uh," sometimes as much as a hundred times during one class, and I would catch myself tallying it up with little marks at the top of my page.  She was known throughout the high school for this phrase.)  That's kind of how this book was.  It's like the author looked at the Thesaurus, got hooked on this one word and never went any further.  It was even used THREE times in ONE sentence.  I researched this word - it's not even being used correctly.  I became curious as to how many times it was used and highlighted it each time - 108 times!!  But I digress ...I almost gave up in the beginning, but honestly, I wanted to know if they found the missing girl.  By about 10%, they had introduced other connecting stories so the word had dwindled off, only to be brought back every time the story was with the siblings.  But the stories did keep my attention.There's actually so much going on in this book.  So much.  (Sometimes too much.)  CJ and his sister Steph (both had been through a really traumatic event two years earlier and were still heeling from it), a cult with an Archmessiah, the lady who owns the casino (who's a real witch, by the way), the government and a murderer.  Wow.CJ's spirit leaves his body and enters Steph's when they go out because, after that horrible incident, he's afraid to leave the house.  He goes into other people's bodies to learn what they know, him and his sister working together to solve crimes.  This is the center of the story.  The other stories are centered around this main one, all connecting to each other and, in the end, converging together.  Quite an interesting story with several things that caught my attention and an ending that leaves you wanting a little bit more (I like to know where the characters I've liked went at the end of a story and this is open for another book).So you see why I'm stuck.  There were both good things and bad things.  Was the telling of the story enough to make those little (and sometimes big) annoyances disappear?  I don't know.  I think I'll give it a 4 and let you decide for yourself whether you want to read it or not.Note: I was given a copy of this story in exchange for my honest review.