Okay, if you loved this book, then prepared to get angry at me.

Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, hyped this book up. On the internet, in forums, they were all like ‘It’s AMAZING’. WHAT WAS SO AMAZING ABOUT IT? Please, can someone explain it to me? I’m not one to give a book less than three stars, so this one IS three stars. I read the book, I finished it, and man, did that thing drag on…

Basically, the book is about Helen, this girl who’s too tall to be normal, too strong to be normal, and just… not normal. But when she displays her inhuman powers in front of everyone else, she doubles over in pain. Then she starts having nightmares about this desert land and when she wakes, she finds evidence of it with her. Enter the Delos family. Now she’s starting to see weeping dead women, and feels the urge to murder each and every person in the family. Now she must unlock her history and understand what is happening to her.

Alright, I was actually quite excited to read the book. I was so excited because Demigods + females, it’s like OMG it’s a female version of Percy Jackson! To be honest, I’m still in the middle of the first Percy Jackson novel, but it’s really good (I own it so I’m trying to go through my library books first). So I expected something like that. Nope, nothing.

Literally, I didn’t feel any connection with the characters or between the characters. Even people in love, or avenging their love, I felt NOTHING. There was no feeling, no gasps of resentment uttered, nothing. It’s just… there. At some points, the thought processes and the reactions to situations were so idiotic that I would laugh. Not because it’s funny, not at all, just because it was so stupid.

On the cover, Lauren Kate called it a “Gorgeous and haunting saga”. One it was not gorgeous: she was an awkward tall girl who had stomach cramps way too often to be deemed healthy. It wasn’t haunting:

the dead sisters disappeared near the beginning of the book

. Lastly, it’s not a saga. Sagas reach out towards generations of people, like Star Wars is a saga because it’s been seen and read by generations. Harry Potter will likely become a saga because all of us are so hooked on it that we’ll shove it at our kids. This book is a premiere novel that doesn’t emit much feeling or connection to anything.

I’ll still read the other books in hopes that her writing and the series itself with get better, but for now, this series is definitely not one of my favourites. There were some lines I liked, but other than that… yeah, nothing.

Plot: 4/5
Characters: 3/5
World Building: 4/5
Cover: 5/5
Overall: 3/5
GoodReads Rating: 4.14/5

-review by Between Printed Pages