What do you think?
Rate this book
274 pages, Paperback
First published October 21, 2012
Maybe a boy really did like her instead of Heather for once, and she had screwed up her chances with him by accusing him of being a spy [...] When most guys saw her and Heather together, they really only saw Heather."
Wow, Becca, your life must be so hard. I'm so sorry.
And this one -His smile snapped on like he had flipped a switch. Right, To make Becca less suspicious. She wished it didn't make sense, but it did.
Unless she was just being paranoid because she didn't know to deal with the idea that a guy might actually like her.
We get it, Becca. You're unlikeable - what a shocker.
OKAY, OKAY, OKAY. I'm done ranting about Becca's personality.
Another thing that really annoyed me about this book was Becca's interactions with Heather, which was basically the same thing over and over and over and over...
Here are the steps:
1. Becca finds out something and wants to talk to Heather about it.
2. Heather gets angry because she doesn't want to talk.
3. Becca is sad.
I am so tired of reading this same situation multiple times - it just felt like the story wasn't going anywhere. Throughout the entire book, it felt like the author tried so hard to make it suspenseful so that the audience would be blown away when she revealed things, bit by bit. But everything was just too predictable."[...] I asked about all surveillance on Heather." She hesitated.
"And?"
"There is no surveillance on Heather."
Not really. Points for trying, though. But sorry, we already knew that Becca was overreacting.
Moving on, the relationship between Becca and Heather, as well as Becca and Jake, was simply so full of imbalances that irritated me to no end. Becca made many questionable decisions, and yet she continued to justify them, trying to be the one that was right - and surprise surprise, Jake and Heather always apologized at the end.
And the next thing (at this point I'm realizing that the main thing that made this story two stars was Becca herself) was the one line that jumped out to me near the 3/4 mark of the book, as Becca thinks about Jake -"There hadn't been another kiss since she had watched Anna die two days ago.
Huh. Let's read that again."There hadn't been another kiss since she had watched Anna die two days ago.
Yes ma'am/sir. You've read that correctly. Becca's friend died two days ago (sidenote: it was Becca's fault), but what's on Becca's mind isn't that death (Oh no, how preposterous!), it's the kiss she had with Jake - the boy who she's just gotten to know. How adorable.
Sigh.
And lastly, I guess I just didn't like the way the atmosphere was portrayed. It felt like a serious dystopian, complete with betrayal and murder, but the story I got was a weak love story involving a boy with a tragic past and a girl who was simple too blind to see how ABSOLUTELY PERFECT AND BEAUTIFUL AND STRONG AND COURAGEOUS she was.
The plot summary had some really neat ideas, and I'm sad to say that the book definitely did not meet my expectations, and I won't be reading the next book and finishing the series.
I mean, how could I find the willpower and the time to, when I have 460 more promising books on my to-read shelf?![]()
“Living by your principles will always be the harder path. But you have to do it anyway. You have to do what’s right no matter how hard it gets, or one day you’ll find out you’ve become somebody you can’t live with.”
“I will not be someone who abandons my principles as soon as they become inconvenient. I will not be someone who says that certain things have to be done… as long as somebody else does them.”
- Raleigh Dalcourt, The Torturer’s Daughter
For more reviews, visit thoughtsbyj!