Review: The story didn't go anywhere and the lead character was annoying
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 02 18, 2014
The Tempering by Adrienne JamesThe Tempering is about a young woman, Mackenzie Duncan, who managed to rise above her poor upbringing and leave her nay-saying mother and inmate father behind to attend Harvard. She majored in Mythology and Folklore and had great dreams for what she planned to do with her degree. Then, she decided to walk through the park on her way home from a football game that she wasn’t even enjoying and didn’t want to go to in the first place. A wolf attacked her and her life changed forever. She discovered that her college major wasn’t quite as fictional as she had always believed.Mackenzie was not, to me, a likable character. She was whiny, bitchy, and never seemed satisfied with anything. She also wasn’t very well developed. Time passed so quickly in the book without anything being acknowledged that there was really no way to get to know her very well.The two potential heroes in the story, Geoff and Liam, were completely different in nature, or seemed to be. Again, the characters weren’t built up enough to actually develop much of an opinion about either, except that Geoff was a selfish jerk. Liam seemed to be a nice guy, but he wasn’t featured enough to fully decide.Nothing of real interest actually happened in this novel. Mackenzie and Liam were just figuring things out. I was rather disappointed to have read an entire novel, only to have it end abruptly, going nowhere.The Tempering has an interesting story line, with an idea I’ve not read before. With substantial work and more time spent on plot, character development, and sentence structure, this could be a really great novel. There is to be a sequel, it seems, and if James does a better job of writing about what’s happening rather than skipping over details, and if the characters are well developed, this will be an interesting series.I rate this novel two stars, with the potential for more…An ARC was provided by the author for an honest review.