Review: Great Premise, but Sadly The Rest Didn't Measure Up
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 03 26, 2013
I wanted to love this book SO much because it has such a great premise and reminded me a lot of those wonderful medical thrillers like "Coma."It opens with a great Prologue that was interesting and hooked me right away, but then starting in Chapter 1 things began to fall flat. The suspense felt forced. Ordinary things would happen and Melanie would suddenly be hyper suspicious of them for no good reason except to serve the plot. (And the constant questions in her head over and over got annoying quickly). Then she proceeded to do things that seemed to defy logic. Her reasons for not calling the police at several different opportunities, for example, didn't ring true, and the number of times she left her car running for long periods of time had me scratching my head. The problems just kept snowballing from there.I think the thing that bothered me the most was the way Melanie kept running back into danger as soon as she'd narrowly escaped from something else. And for a character who was so ultra suspicious over ordinary things, she was very quick to trust the wrong people, again without a strong, logical reason. It seemed like she acted for the benefit of a pre-determined set of plot events rather than acting according to her personality traits.Another problem the story had was the emotions of all the characters (not just Melanie) came across as too melodramatic. None of them reacted subtly. Everything was to the max, no matter what the circumstance.Lastly, the villain came across as far too weak a person (mentally, physically) to be a big threat in my eyes. I don't want to say too much about this person and create a spoiler, but for someone who was supposed to be so powerful and intelligent, this person made some silly mistakes and wasn't a formidable enough foe in my opinion.That said, the twists the story takes (even if they are a little on the illogical side) did keep me reading, and I read to the end to see how things would turn out. Again, LOVED the premise and what inspired the story (enjoyed the author's note at the end), that's mainly what kept me reading, but the characters didn't act realistically enough for my tastes.