Review: Surprisingly Fantastic
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 05 16, 2013
Originally posted on GoodreadsWow. What a surprise. Lately, I've been on kind of a rollercoaster ride with indie books. It's sort of like that game of plucking petals from daisies - love one, love one not - and after a strong start at the beginning of the year with a ton of indies I loved, I've been a little gun shy as of late. But, yay for me, maybe the drought is over.So, this novel wasn't perfect. There's a twist in it which seemed a bit contrived and I wasn't surprised to learn the author had some difficulty formulating the twist until well into writing the book. It shows. I'm not going to reveal the twist, I try to stay away from spoilers when possible, and I think this one is intergral to the story. However, I will say that it could have used more time to develop. Clues should have been sprinkled throughout the story to avoid the complete change in direction this novel took. It was jarring and came out of left field.There were some scenes which could have used a better edit; some occasional tense issues, where it was unclear whether it was past or present; and some grammatical issues, but nothing that pulled me from the story.The beauty of this novel lies with its character and I love that Katie Klein took her time and allowed the relationship between Jaden and Parker to evolve organically. In fact, though the signs are there, we aren't really even given a glipse into their prospective love story until around the 50% mark and it's some time later that it actually blossoms. It's clear that the author enjoyed these characters and gave them a great deal of consideration. They were flawed, but not crazy-broken, and they had real fears and real struggles.Secondary characters were also well fleshed out. Jaden's family was fun to get to know and were as real as my own: quirky and over-protective, selfish and loving. It was a nice, well balanced mash up of emotions that meshed well with the overall story. Jaden's friends were also likeable, though we didn't get a lot of time to get to know them. What I appreciated, though, was that even through Jaden's struggles, they remained steadfast.Where the story lost me a bit was toward the end, post-twist, when the author seemed to struggle. It seemed that, perhaps, she had some issues closing the loop on a few things. The writing got a little clunky and the plot seemed to meander a bit. But, again, I got past it as the balance of the book was really well written. If this had gotten a proper edit, those issues would have been cleaned up so I will forgive this as it's an indie.Altogether this was a really good read and one I would recommend. Kudos.