Review: Good Basic Story, Back Story a Bit Unnecessary
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 01 11, 2013
Devon's Curse is a good paranormal story with the main character, Devon, being an adult who authors best-selling novelizations of what her readers do not realize are her visions of ghosts and their stories.  She has seen ghosts since childhood, when she was institutionalized after the people in her lives found it difficult to deal with her behaviors.  Not believing that she was seeing dead people, she was diagnosed with having schizophrenia and hallucinations.  Her primary doctor took care of her until she was eighteen, after which she moved away and began to write her novels.  At one point in her adult life, she became intimately involved with her former doctor, which becomes an issue when that doctor dies and his son approaches her with questions about why her first novel so closely mimics the life of another child that looks eerily similar to Devon and who was found wandering in the woods in the same manner as the book's main character had been found--and, unbeknownst to Devon, who doesn't remember anything before age five, in the same manner as Devon had been found. However, the doctor's son has read Devon's file and knows her personal history, and he knows that Devon doesn't know her own history.With Devon persuaded to help the young girl accept her ability to see ghosts, Devon is compelled to investigate her own past and the appearance of The Shadow Man, a figure that terrified her own childhood and now is interesting and rearing itself in the young child's life.  In order to help the young girl, Devon must help herself and seek out her past and all that she does not know.A good story, and good writing, there are some type-o's that are distracting with the final character in a number of words missing--and, at least in the Kindle edition that this reader experienced, there are missing half-sentences and two-to-three-line passages that are obviously a result of the electronic transfer to the e-reader.  The story can be read with these issues, but it is distracting.Also distracting is the need for the author to include the romantic involvement with Devon's former counselor.  While it does add an interesting twist at the beginning of the story, as the story develops, it seems incongruent with the behaviors Devon displays in all other aspects of her life and not in keeping with her general character, particularly as she is supposed to be a woman who was strong enough within herself to defy the diagnoses the man had labeled her with for so many years.  However, this is a minor detraction from the total story and it is expected that future writings by this author will be as interesting and fascinating as is Devon's Curse.