Author: Christina Leigh Pritchard
Series or Stand-alone:
Stand Alone
How I got it:
For a Book Tour
Pages: 128
Publisher: Createspace
Genre: Young Adult / Paranormal
First Published: April 13, 201
Buy it from: Amazon
Book Trailer:
First Line(s): “Lisa, if you don't finish packing your things, I sweat you'll go with nothing.”
The GIST:
The GIST:
Seventeen year old Lisa Brown’s
life is falling apart. First, her mother and father divorce, then their house
forecloses and now, her mother has decided to commit herself to a psychiatric
hospital.
If that weren’t enough, she must
leave sunny south Florida to attend a boarding school full of geniuses in cold,
Lynn, Massachusetts. The city where the locals chant “Lynn, Lynn, city of sin;
you never come out the way you went in.”
And, they aren’t kidding. Lisa
must live in a tiny shack with two strange teenagers, a dog named Pig who
growls when you look at him and a cat named Rat. “Mind the cat,” everyone says.
What the heck is wrong with this place?
Lisa thinks she’s landed in her
own house of horrors with the anti-social Alex and his facetious sister Ally.
But, the real drama begins the day she is struck by lightning…
OPINION:*
C I N follows the story of Lisa, a high school senior who
lives with her reckless mother in Florida but suddenly is forced to move with an
estranged relative to Lynn, Massachusetts. Obviously Lisa is very upset about
the idea of the move and even more upset when she is forced to live with reclusive geniuses Alex
and Ally. Alex and Ally are two very strange kids who attend her new school but they
don’t socialize much or at all. Alex hates being touched, and Lisa gets a pain when she accidentally does touch him, while Ally has socializing and jealousy
issues.
I’ll start with what I did like. I liked Lisa’s back story
and her relationship with her mother.
Lisa’s mother basically abandons her with a stranger after experiencing
a lot of psychological issues. This part of the story felt authentic. I felt the author was also really creative with the world-building. I liked the idea of
lightening giving you powers but, unfortunately, the logic of the paranormal aspect to the book was very confusing to follow and not
explained well enough.
The major problem I had with this book was mostly in the writing
and plotting. The writing felt really choppy and rough. For example, sometimes
I had no idea what a sentence was supposed to mean or what the character was saying. A lot of the story felt repetitive
because the sentence structure didn’t vary much.
With the book being only 128 pages long, I wish more time
was spent on each segment of the story. The plot shot around like crazy and there are
parts where the timing of things happening was off. In one part Michael, Lisa’s
I just met you but you’re my new best friend, tells Lisa he’s going to meet up
with her future roommate Donna but then mysteriously shows up the same day
on a cruise ship with his other classmates.
The thing did save this book for me and the reason I
finished it was that I was really interested in Alex, the love interest. He was
mysterious and intriguing. I liked how Lisa kept thinking he was one way but
discovering he was actually the opposite, kind of like a Pride and Prejudice
thing but one sided. It was definitely insta-love but that didn’t bother me so
much. The way things wrapped up was
confusing though. I didn’t understand Lisa’s sudden complacency towards everything she was fighting against for the last pages of the book.
OVERALL:
The story had some issues with plotting and writing I can't overlook overall. However, the premise and love interest were worth continuing reading for. I'm probably not interested in continuing the series.---2.0 out of 10.
*Whenever I give a book a negative review, I like to remind readers that I am only one opinion and they should make up their own minds about it. Maybe you'll like it when I didn't.
