The Primroses Were Over

The prose in this was so purple it would make a plum blush. 

I was looking forward to this quite a bit. It is dystopian and seemed to have a touch of paranormal and just the tagline seemed to suggest that we had a strong, take-charge heroine here. I even found the strikethrough on the cover to be charming.

I was about two pages in when I decided the strikethrough was super, super annoying. I can see it being something that appeals to some people, but for me, it drove me just a little bit nuts. There was, at one point, an entire page of it.

A. Full. Page. Of. This.

I almost put the book down at that point. But, eternal optimist that I am, I soldiered on (also, it read very very quickly. Possibly because there were pages of the same sentence over and over, but hey, when The Normandy says I have half an hour left at fifty percent, I have trouble putting it down.)

It wasn't worth the bother.

The ending was intriguing, certainly, and there were some interesting aspects introduced at that point that I kind of want to know more about, but it was too little, too late for me given how skimpy the world-building and character development had been up to that point.

The love story. Oh dear Lord, the love story. I don't even know where to begin except it combines the worst parts of insta-love with the worst parts of childhood crush on someone I never spoke to. People complain about love triangles, but my dislike for them (which is, to be brutally honest, minor at best) does not hold a candle to my passionate hatred for these two "love" tropes.

Juliette (who, I will note, is named after one of those characters from fiction that both gets way more love than she deserves and is also one of the only ones teenage "bookish" girls in bad YA novels recognize and I can tell this deserves its own post/rant, so I'm going to stop here before this sentence gets any more out of control) practically doesn't exist except for her self-loathing and her romance with Adam, which is pretty horrific since the story is told through her (alarmingly purple-prosed and overly metaphorical) point-of-view. Adam was just...I don't get it. I do not get it. I think I am supposed to like him maybe because he is nice to kids? Or something? I felt nothing for him, and his creepy stalker-ish behavior with Juliette would be even worse if she apparently didn't return his feelings for no good reason except they had true love by virtue of never talking to each other during their childhood but, you know, being kind of in the same general area a few times.

The villain, I must admit, was intriguing, and intriguing enough I may break down and read the next ones eventually. I could tell they were working the love triangle angle, and I must admit I don't trust pretty much anyone in this entire book to not have ulterior motives, so I would like to see what else he is up to.

I also liked Juliette's power. It was interesting, and the ramifications of how it worked were genuinely fascinating. I just wish it belonged to a character I liked more. She is not Katniss, or even Tris. She doesn't have a spine, really, and she never grows enough of one to satisfy me. Woe-is-me is annoying enough in characters without power and with character development; when she has the former and does not have the latter (and also has people tripping over themselves to help her just because), it all gets to be way too much.

I may eventually pick up the next book in this series, but it will be after I have waited a bit to see what else comes out that perhaps takes these ideas and does something with them I find more enjoyable. There are a lot of things in this world to read, after all.