I hate to write negative reviews, I do. I try to find some redeeming parts of a book while tempering it with the not-so-good. I sat for hours trying to figure out how to do that, but decided to be blunt & honest so that other potential readers can understand why I didn’t like the book and discern for themselves the validity of other reviews. I do expect that most books will have several 5 star reviews, obviously written by family/friends or someone who has a monetary interest in the product. But apparently, I’m the only person other than the authors family/friends who actually read this book. When a book has so many 5 star reviews that talk about it being “the best book I’ve read ever!”, I am suspicious, especially if they are dated close together, written by reviewers who have little or no other written reviews and don’t have any negative things to point out. I’m just saying. I also found the same reviews written on other book sites, which waters them all down.
I read. A LOT. I average about 5 books a week of all different genres. This book sounded really interesting and did have a good plot – in theory. In reality, the writing was very amateurish. Lots of gratuitous bad language used WAY out of context and with nearly every character in the book. Using the “F” word in what seemed like every other sentence of dialogue was overkill. The characters WAY overreacted to minor things and under-reacted over major things.
The story jumped all over the place and was difficult to follow and even more difficult to believe (and not in a cool “fantasy” way). For instance, the character Faith starts out as a quiet, loving, religious wife/mother. Her husband seemed equally as sweet as the minister of a local church. They had twin daughters, the perfect little family. Then Faith’s ex-boyfriend comes back, who is apparently the devil and she is apparently possessed. There was never any explanation why people were behaving the way that they did or what the heck was going on most of the time. Another weird part was about a flower that…well, I’m not sure WHAT it did except open up and spray blood and gore over a kid. It was never explained why and had no bearing on the rest of the story. The weirdest scene was when the main character, Rory, was having a minor disagreement with his girlfriend, Faith. She was lamenting that she was “confused” about what she wanted to do for the rest of her life. It was just a quiet discussion between a seemingly loving couple. Then, out of nowhere, he punched her in the face. Hard. Her reaction was, of course, to cry but then they continued to talk as if he had just yelled at her. Then he beat the crap out of her and moved out. This is the same woman he meets years later and she acts as if he never did anything bad to her, like they broke their engagement because they just grew apart. It made absolutely no sense.
As I would read from chapter to chapter, I honestly began to wonder if this book was written by two different people, one being a high school aged kid. The dialogue was weak, weird and generous use of a thesaurus was apparent, peppering the lines with 47 versions of the same word. The characters were not likable and not well developed at all.
Character after character would appear without rhyme or reason, then randomly,conveniently and violently killed in a difficult to believe manner. And not just bit characters, I’m talking about main characters too. If the author got tired of them, they were gone. This book should be listed under the “horror” genre as there is a lot of blood/gore/sexual themes.
The book started off well – twin brothers playing together. Then one starts using foul language and a tragedy strikes. After that, the book went downhill fast and gained speed with every chapter.
I may be in the minority here, but the reviews for this book do not make any sense – unless maybe they are part of the book and intended to be exactly opposite of the writers really mean. I don’t like to be harsh, I try to find the good in every book I read, but the only thing I could find good about this book was the idea. Written by a professional & skilled author, it could be an amazing story.
The price of this book when I downloaded it was very fair, considering it was free. I gave it an extra star because the idea was good even in the writing was not.
A Confirmed Bookworm 