Angela DeMott's Reviews > The Book of Essie

How can a book have such a wackadoo plot and yet still be so incredibly boring? It wasn't quite crazy enough to be exciting and it wasn't developed enough to be fascinating. Every single reveal was exactly what I expected it to be and nothing more. The characters were so underdeveloped that the villains weren't at all scary, and all but one of the protagonists were incredibly lame. I didn't want to spend any time with anyone in this book!

The other major issue is that I think the author was trying to tackle too many serious topics, but she just doesn't have the writing skills to do this, so the book's tone is all wrong. It was a really lethal combination of bad plotting, boring characters, unrealistic dialogue, and confusing backstories. I would recommend this book to no one.

So why two stars? At the end of the day, I did want to know what would happen to Roarke (I honestly could not have cared less about Essie) and that's what kept me reading. I wish a different author had written a different novel about Roarke, excluding the entire Hicks family. There was a little kernel of something interesting in his character, and I would have liked to see him developed in a different context.