Review: Slow Starter with Strong Potential
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 07 19, 2014
I would like to thank Curiosity Quills Press for granting me a copy of this e-ARC to read in exchange for an honest review. Though I received this e-book for free that in no way impacts my review. I actually give this book 3.5 stars, but as most sites don't allow for anything but whole numbers, it officially gets a 3 star rating.Goodreads Blurb:Quiet college sophomore Emma Roberts remembers her mother’s sage advice: “don’t sleep around, don’t burp in public, and don’t tell anyone you see ghosts”. But when cute Mike Carlson drowns in the campus river under her watch, Emma’s sheltered life shatters.Blamed for Mike’s death and haunted by nightmares, Emma turns to witchcraft and a mysterious Book of Shadows to bring him back. Under a Blood Moon, she lights candles, draws a pentacle on the campus bridge, and casts a spell. The invoked river rages up against her, but she escapes its fury. As she stumbles back to the dorm, a stranger drags himself from the water and follows her home.Instead of raising Mike, Emma assists the others she stole back from the dead—a pre-med student who jumped off the bridge, a young father determined to solve his own murder, and a frat boy Emma can’t stand…at first. More comfortable with the dead than the living, Emma delves deeper into the seductive Book of Shadows. Her powers grow, but witchcraft may not be enough to protect her against the vengeful river and the killers that feed it their victims.This is a story full of potential, but seemed to offer up too many smaller stories along the way that got distracting. It was entertaining, sweet, sad, funny, and even scary, yet it seemed to have a bit too much taking place. I felt there were too many characters trying to do too many things in not enough time.If you were to lookup the term 'wallflower' in a dictionary you would find a picture of Emma Roberts. Painfully shy, Emma was far more likely to be found sitting in her dorm room rereading a favorite book on a weekend night than standing awkwardly alone at a party. Yet somehow her roommate Chrissy had managed to drag her to a party, where Chrissy's latest crush was expected to be. That night Emma met Mike. Mike of the stunning eyes, who actually talks to her. Who'd have thought such an innocent meeting would be the cause of so much chaos?Emma stumbles across a Book of Shadows and in a fit of despair she grabs the book, goes to the river and does a spell to bring Mike back. But the spell doesn't work, or at least not the way Emma planned. Instead she gets three different people who'd drowned in the same river. So she tries to help them fix whatever it is that's keeping them from moving on. One of the ghosts is a frat boy who gets on her last nerve, but the longer he stays the deeper under her skin he gets. She did the spell to bring Mike back and yet she starts falling for someone else. Can you say fickle much?However Emma is having more and more trouble keeping track of the web of lies she's been spinning. And she's been relying more and more on the Book of Shadows for help with all the mounting problems she's getting involved in. It's almost as if she's becoming addicted to the book, but is that because she's scared or simply likes the power it's giving her?For someone who spent her entire life being a wallflower it's pretty surprising how glib Emma can be, how smooth her lies are becoming. She starts to grow a spine, but still lets everyone, living or dead, walk all over her. For example, during the worst of the problems surrounding Mike's death, his brother Kevin publicly blames Emma, her roommate Chrissy moves out of their dorm room, and a campus cop is getting far too nosey.The majority of the book read like a game of 'six degrees of separation'. It may have helped me enjoy the book more had I known that this was the first of a series, as hopefully I'd have been more patient knowing that Ms. Noser was setting the scene for the series to follow. Somehow I missed the smaller print on the cover of the book (a hazard of reading e-books I suppose). Even so, it still felt as if there were too many stories going on inside the larger story, and the way they were all interrelated was a bit too much for me. Other than that it was an entertaining read. Jake was a blast, giving more depth to a frat boy than you'd expect. Steve was kind of creepy, and I get the feeling Emma hasn't seen the last of him yet. And the others had a fair amount of dimension for the amount of time they were actually part of the story. The second book sounds as if it could really grow legs and take off, so I suspect I'll stick around to see what happens.