Thursday, July 14, 2011

Review: Paranormalcy



Evie has been special for as long as she can remember: she can see through glamours, the magic that hides vampires and werewolves and faeries from the rest of the humans.  Her best friend is a mermaid, she kind of dated a faerie, and her job is hunting down, Tasing, and capturing paranormals.  And yet she'd love to think of herself as normal.

But of course, things are never that easy.  Paranormals are dying - they're being murdered.  And Evie seems to have a mysterious connection to the killer.  Now she only needs to solve the mystery, defeat the killer, get her shapeshifting crush to fall in love with her, change the ending of a dark prophecy, elude dangerously scheming faeries, and oh yeah, maybe go to prom...

Entertainment: 

I wanted to like this book, I really did.  But three pages in, and I was mentally groaning.  My main problems with this book: Evie's an airhead I couldn't connect with at all.  The plot was just unbelievable; I'm okay with a little suspension of disbelief, but not the kind that has me rolling my eyes and saying, "Yeah, I'm so sure."  I saw the ending coming about 200 pages away.  And most importantly for me, it didn't add anything new to the paranormal YA genre.  I really like books that add something new and exciting; and I didn't feel that Paranormalcy had anything unique to say.

Oh, and it took me a good minute to figure out how to correctly pronounce the title, which was just obnoxious.  Maybe saying "paranormalcy" comes easy to some people, but for me it didn't at all.

Plot: 

Like I said above, there just wasn't anything new here.  There was nothing to make me sit up and go, "Ooooh, exciting," or "Hey, didn't see that coming," or even "That's cool."  It was just dull, and I couldn't force myself to stay interested.

Characters: 

I'll give two stars because Lend, the love interest, was interesting and actually kind of cute.  Otherwise, though, I couldn't find anything to like.  Evie's so very dumb blonde.  She could have been super cool, or super tough, but instead she seemed to be this weird cheerleader-hunter combination.  Maybe it's because I'm not enormously girly myself, but her rhapsodizing about pink and soap operas got on my nerves.  And she names her Taser.  Tasey.  I think it was meant to be cute, but I really almost put the book down at that point.  Obviously she won't disagree with all readers the same way she did with me, and for some she might actually resonate quite well.  This isn't a character that is just bad... she's just a character that I personally don't like.

Anyways, her aside, the rest of the cast was kind of blah.  I'm not actually sure who the antagonist was really supposed to be - out of the two I thought had villain potential, one wimped out and the other actually seemed dubiously well-intentioned at the end.  So yeah.  There was just nothing that stood out about the rest of the characters.

Writing: 

It was okay, a little casual and girly for my tastes, but a pretty enjoyable style overall.

End Result: two stars.  I was not impressed.

1 comment:

  1. We can understand your comments, although they definitely seem to be in the minority. All around the blogosphere we seem to read nothing but glowing reviews for this book.

    We had mixed reactions, but we did love Vivian. To us she was the best thing about the book, and we hope there's more of her in the series (which we will probably read at some point).

    ReplyDelete