Review: Rough beginning, but totally worth it!
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 02 15, 2014
The thing about The Reckoning and its predecessor, The Reaping, is that it’s packed to the absolute brim with a strange originality that I positively crave. The other things about these two books is that their beginnings, for some reason, just plain put me off. My bout with distaste, in this case, ran much longer and stronger than the previous reading.When I began this book, I pretty much frowned throughout the whole thing. Somehow, it seemed as though all the life had been sucked out of the narrative and out of our heroine, Carson. The writing was horridly bare and overall sloppy, the events therein were vapid although they were meant to be heart-wrenching (to Carson, they certainly were), and to top it all off there were these weird analogies floating around, making me double-take and WTF way too many times for comfort.His voice was so low it barely ranked above a whisper. But I heard it. It echoed through my heart like the tortured howl of a coyote cutting through a canyon at night. p. 21. (This is made all the more bewildering for the fact that Carson lives far from any canyons whatsoever. Her surroundings are beset by woods, woods and more woods. It’s a noticeable theme in both the books, so the canyon thing — not to mention the howling coyote thing — really caught me off-guard.)Anger and indignation rode me like a ruthless jockey. p. 20. (Really? Wtf?)Anyway, I bring up the bad points first because SPOILER  as soon as Carson finds out that the Derek she’s been living with — rather unhappily — isn’t really him but his dead brother, Garrett, it hits all the good parts, and the good parts are REALLY good.It’s an instantaneous return to the awesome smooth storytelling that pervaded The Reaping except better because, holy crap, do things get crazy in this sequel. Stomaching those first like 35-40 pages is 100% worth it for the fantastic and crazy things that happen — with a more natural narration — afterward. This book topped my expectations and more, and I was super excited at the end when Carson and Derek carved out their own happily ever after for themselves amid all the wreckage that death and the dead have wrought on their lives.And they get through it by salvaging the part of them that’s the best — each other.“Things will get better. I promise,” he declared sincerely. “I’ll help you and we’ll figure out a way to take Leah and Grey and Garrett out of commission. There’s a reason we’re soul mates.” p. 68It was love — in all its forms, be it compassion, mercy, kindness, patience, gentleness, forgiveness, justice, belief, hope, endurance or true soul-deep selfless love. It was love, love that was humming in my ears and tingling along mt skin, love that was pouring from my soul and crackling between my fingertips. Love was my new weapon, the most powerful weapon known to mankind and the only one I’d need to defeat the darkness of any kind. p. 114