Review: The Fallen Star
The Fallen Star by Jessica Sorensen
My rating: [rating=1]
Summary:
For eighteen year-old Gemma, life has never been normal. Up until recently, she has been incapable of feeling emotion. And when she’s around Alex, the gorgeous new guy at school, she can feel electricity that makes her skin buzz. Not to mention the monsters that haunt her nightmares have crossed over into real-life. But with Alex seeming to hate her and secrets popping up everywhere, Gemma’s life is turning into a chaotic mess. Things that shouldn’t be real suddenly seem to exist. And as her world falls apart, figuring out the secrets of her past becomes a matter of life and death.
Review:
Not sure if it’s more of a “It was OK” or a “Didn’t like it” book for me. I got it for free on Kindle, and gave it a try because the basic plot points—a girl without emotions, the fallen star—seemed interesting. And I still think they are. Or could be, if used differently, of perhaps with a different pacing. The way things were, the first half of the novel went too slowly, with too much detailing and repeating on the one hand (I doubt the weird, uhm, electricity between Gemma and Alex needed to be mentioned every ten pages or so), and on the other hand not enough details about other aspects (for instance, the ’emotionless girl’ part, that got me attracted to the book in the first place, is thrown through the window quite fast).
Well, I could forgive a slow-paced plot if characters and relationships were making up for it. Unfortunately, for the whole story, I just couldn’t get any liking to the characters. Gemma was just too whiny and unable to stand up for whatever, letting herself be bossed around, or doing a half-arsed job at getting the answers she wanted; maybe this fits with her previous emotionless self, but it doesn’t make for a very likeable heroine. Also, how can one be so absolutely clueless about what was truly happening, in spite of the very fishy and messed up stuff that was staring her in the face? As for Alex… no kidding, that guy was just infuriating. Not witty, not dark and mysterious: just an infuriating liar doubled with an asshole whose reactions were weird at beast, and seriously bordering on sociopathic at worst. Even Nicholas didn’t feel as creepy, because at least he was true to his ambiguous self, instead of repeating “you can trust me, tell me everything, blah blah” while openly lying most of the time (to himself as well as to Gemma, I guess). The constant bickering, arguing, glaring and hate me-hate me not that went on between those two for the whole story kept on annoying me, too. I’m all for snark and tense relationships, only here it was more like teenage angst going rampant, and this quickly gets old in my opinion. On top of it, I couldn’t really find the ‘romance’ part in this; telling the reader repeatedly about ‘electricity’ between them doesn’t make me instantly go “oh, sure, they’re falling in love”. I kept on waiting for an explanation to this phenomenon, and ‘love’ certainly wasn’t cutting it.
In the end, I found myself skimming through the novel to get to the finale. And then I had to stare at one annoying cliffhanger, with too few answers regarding the overall plot. Alright, I get that more will be revealed in the next book. Still, this is highly frustrating.