Review: Great Potential, but Poor Execution
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 05 15, 2014
FULL REVIEW CAN BE READ HERE: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/921757540I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest reviewI also don't care enough to tag spoilers, so there's that warningMy god, what a mess. The idea is great. A bunch of paranormals in a dystopian-like future trying to figure out their powers only to be pulled into a war they must fight in order to save the world. Alright, I can be happy with that. What I can't be happy with, is the poorly thought out characters and the mishmash of "plot". To be quite honest, I'm not sure what was accomplished in those nearly 600 pages. Very little was explained. I get this is a series (one I will not be continuing) but you have to give us something. Not just anything, but something that makes sense.Let me start off with the characters. Sally, in particular. She's not our hero, but she's the one I have the most problems with. For one, her constant whining, crying, and fainting. She has two boys swooning over her and she never chooses one, but instead hops back and forth to whomever is more convenient at the time. All of those cliches of girls in hero books? Pretty sure she fits them all. Intense moment? She starts crying over how she misses her parents. Okay, I get it. She's suddenly shoved into this world that doesn't make sense to her (because Oslo won't explain ANYTHING, but I'll get to that later) and she keeps getting attacked and she finds her home is now a smoking crater in the ground, her parents might be dead, but no one knows because they can't get in contact with them. Okay. Yeah, she's been through a lot. But please stop whining. The others have gone through the same thing, and you don't see them bursting into tears at random times. So why does Sally? My guess, is because she's the girl. The boys remark on countless occasions how she is a "typical woman". Always able to find the bathroom. Focused on her appearance. They make jokes about her cooking for them. Yes. They make a "you should be in the kitchen" joke, although it is a subtle one. Breeze jokingly remarks how Sally should be cooking for them, and Sally gets pissed about it, which is the right reaction, but she then just laughs it off. At that point, there was just so much angering me with this book that I didn't look past it. Oh, then there's the part when they get the junk ship to fly out west. The boys are out chatting away and they hear Sally scream. Thinking she got hurt or something, they rush to her rescue. Only to find her crying over the disgusting state of the bathroom and insisting she won't leave until it is cleaned. She then locks herself in a room on the ship until the boys finish cleaning it. We later find out she brought in nice looking hand towels to add a "woman's touch" to the bathroom. Do you see why this pisses me off? Oh, and we can't forget the fainting. I should have counted the number of times everyone fainted. Breeze blacked out maybe three times, most due to him falling out of the sky at high velocity. Ray passed out a couple of times because he was beaten so badly. Sally? She fainted at least five times, most of which were due to something she saw. Such as a strange man in the basement. The only reason she fainted that I can think of where it was actually a reasonable reaction was when she was beaten so badly in her astral form she was shoved back into her body. Naturally, all this fainting made for a reason one of the boys could swoop in and rescue her. She, like the rest of this book, had so much potential. It's sad to see all that go to waste on poor character development.