Shattered Dreams by Ellie James
Series: Midnight Dragonfly
Publisher: St Martin's, 2011
Genre: Fantasy
Sub-genre: Contemporary, YA
Rating: 2 1/2 pints of blood
The pink/purple cover cover is... well. It looks like a self-published book, actually. Someone came up with a vague concept and slapped something together as quickly as possible, and while it could be worse, it lacks the polish you'd expect from something coming out of a major publishing house. The lighting is rushed, the font is a poor choice, the gradient at the bottom is out of place, and even the pink tank top looks cheap and lacks anything like, say, texture. Shattered Dreams is a powerful title with evocative word imagery, which the people in charge of cover art have completely ignored.
...I mean, "omg, it's soooo sparkly and pretty! I must read it now!"*
The blue cover is a little better, although I'm not quite sure where it's come from. Amazon and goodreads both show the pink/purple cover for North America and something totally different with swirly red words and a moody pale face and dark hair for the UK. This blue cover is floating around the internet, though, and seems to cling pretty close to the concept from the pink/purple version of the cover. It looks a little more finished, but while the colours fit together better and the font is a definite upgrade, neither cover actually suits the book, which is dark in tone and set in New Orleans.
Sixteen-year-old Trinity wants what every teen wants: to fit in. She's been trying to fit in ever since her grandmother (the only caretaker she can remember) died and she had to move to New Orleans to live with her aunt, her only living relative and almost a complete stranger. A couple of the kids have been friendly enough, including her hot lab partner, Chase, but his nasty ex-girlfriend, the very popular Jessica, has been making Trinity's life difficult.
Shortly after a game of truth or dare inside an abandoned house with a bad history turns nasty, Jessica goes missing. Suspicious eyes turn in Trinity's direction. After all, revenge would be such a simple explanation.
Things get more complicated for Trinity when she starts having confusing dreams and visions, most of them centred around Jessica. Bit by bit, she puts together the pieces of information she picks up from these dreams, tormented by the horrible things she sees, and equally tormented by the idea that something might be really wrong with her. And the more her visions start proving true, the more desperate she is not only to try to use them to save Jessica before the narrow window closes, but to keep the police from arresting her and to keep Chase from finding out what a freak she is.
I have mixed reactions to this book. Parts of it were honestly suspenseful and compulsively readable. Other parts were trying too hard to be mysterious and just wound up confusing. There were a number of passages I went back and re-read, trying to figure out what was going on. Keeping vision apart from reality was somethings a bit of a job, but it was more some of the stylistic and narrative choices, trying to keep readers in the dark as much as possible. Writing a mystery is a fine art, and more than once James veered to the side of not giving enough information for a comprehensive narrative in order to avoid letting readers figure out the ending before the protagonist does.
Character-wise, we also end up with a mixed bag. Trinity herself is a bit of a cipher. With everything that's going on around her, including her dreams and her discovery of her own missing background, the force of her personality gets a bit lost. She spends most of the book confused and letting things happen to her instead of taking control of anything. She's not even motivated enough to go digging into her own history. THe only thing she's ever been told about her own parents is that they died in some sort of incident when she was very young, and while she explains her grandmother was reluctant to talk about it, she doesn't seem to have asked anyone or made any effort to do research on her own. Surely a sixteen-year-old could google their names, especially since she knew the city and approximate date of their deaths.
As for her romantic interest... look, I'll be honest. I really hated Chase. He's supposed to be this dreamboat, but I never warmed up to him. He calls Trinity "baby," he repeatedly ignores her requests to back off, and I found his intensity to be creepy and unsettling. I was actually rooting for him to turn out to be the villain, since it would not only be an interesting plot twist but would justify my hatred for him.
I actually did like a number of the secondary characters, though. Trinity's aunt in particular is interesting, and I kind of wonder if the story would have been more fun if it centred around her instead of Trinity. Her life has been under just as much upheaval by the unexpected arrival of her troubled teenage niece, she was smart and caring and in some cases she knew more about what was going on than the girl with the visions. Maybe if the two of them had worked together more as a team I would have found more to like in this book, but the aunt gets shunted to the side in favour of Chase.
The first two-thirds of the book were full of cliff-hangers, and I had a hard time putting it down. The story moved along at a good pace, and in spite of the occasional bout of confusion, the mysteries built on each other until about the last hundred pages or so, when Trinity decides to wander around aimlessly for awhile, trying to escape her problems. She wanders for quite a long time, avoiding both reality and her visions, and the story crawls to a stop. Unfortunately it never quite recovers from this, even when she finally puts the last piece of the puzzle together and the big hunt for both Jessica and the person who abducted her is on.
Ultimately Shattered Dreams is full of interesting ideas but fails to live up to its own promise. If we spent less time with the alleged love interest and more time actively working on they mystery I might have enjoyed this more, but the constant attempts to keep the reader in the dark were more frustrating than effective.
Shattered Dreams is available in trade paperback
. My copy was generously provided by the publisher.
*Nobody's real reaction to this cover, ever.
Publisher: St Martin's, 2011
Genre: Fantasy
Sub-genre: Contemporary, YA
Rating: 2 1/2 pints of blood
The pink/purple cover cover is... well. It looks like a self-published book, actually. Someone came up with a vague concept and slapped something together as quickly as possible, and while it could be worse, it lacks the polish you'd expect from something coming out of a major publishing house. The lighting is rushed, the font is a poor choice, the gradient at the bottom is out of place, and even the pink tank top looks cheap and lacks anything like, say, texture. Shattered Dreams is a powerful title with evocative word imagery, which the people in charge of cover art have completely ignored.
...I mean, "omg, it's soooo sparkly and pretty! I must read it now!"*
The blue cover is a little better, although I'm not quite sure where it's come from. Amazon and goodreads both show the pink/purple cover for North America and something totally different with swirly red words and a moody pale face and dark hair for the UK. This blue cover is floating around the internet, though, and seems to cling pretty close to the concept from the pink/purple version of the cover. It looks a little more finished, but while the colours fit together better and the font is a definite upgrade, neither cover actually suits the book, which is dark in tone and set in New Orleans.
Sixteen-year-old Trinity wants what every teen wants: to fit in. She's been trying to fit in ever since her grandmother (the only caretaker she can remember) died and she had to move to New Orleans to live with her aunt, her only living relative and almost a complete stranger. A couple of the kids have been friendly enough, including her hot lab partner, Chase, but his nasty ex-girlfriend, the very popular Jessica, has been making Trinity's life difficult.
Shortly after a game of truth or dare inside an abandoned house with a bad history turns nasty, Jessica goes missing. Suspicious eyes turn in Trinity's direction. After all, revenge would be such a simple explanation.
Things get more complicated for Trinity when she starts having confusing dreams and visions, most of them centred around Jessica. Bit by bit, she puts together the pieces of information she picks up from these dreams, tormented by the horrible things she sees, and equally tormented by the idea that something might be really wrong with her. And the more her visions start proving true, the more desperate she is not only to try to use them to save Jessica before the narrow window closes, but to keep the police from arresting her and to keep Chase from finding out what a freak she is.
I have mixed reactions to this book. Parts of it were honestly suspenseful and compulsively readable. Other parts were trying too hard to be mysterious and just wound up confusing. There were a number of passages I went back and re-read, trying to figure out what was going on. Keeping vision apart from reality was somethings a bit of a job, but it was more some of the stylistic and narrative choices, trying to keep readers in the dark as much as possible. Writing a mystery is a fine art, and more than once James veered to the side of not giving enough information for a comprehensive narrative in order to avoid letting readers figure out the ending before the protagonist does.
Character-wise, we also end up with a mixed bag. Trinity herself is a bit of a cipher. With everything that's going on around her, including her dreams and her discovery of her own missing background, the force of her personality gets a bit lost. She spends most of the book confused and letting things happen to her instead of taking control of anything. She's not even motivated enough to go digging into her own history. THe only thing she's ever been told about her own parents is that they died in some sort of incident when she was very young, and while she explains her grandmother was reluctant to talk about it, she doesn't seem to have asked anyone or made any effort to do research on her own. Surely a sixteen-year-old could google their names, especially since she knew the city and approximate date of their deaths.
As for her romantic interest... look, I'll be honest. I really hated Chase. He's supposed to be this dreamboat, but I never warmed up to him. He calls Trinity "baby," he repeatedly ignores her requests to back off, and I found his intensity to be creepy and unsettling. I was actually rooting for him to turn out to be the villain, since it would not only be an interesting plot twist but would justify my hatred for him.
I actually did like a number of the secondary characters, though. Trinity's aunt in particular is interesting, and I kind of wonder if the story would have been more fun if it centred around her instead of Trinity. Her life has been under just as much upheaval by the unexpected arrival of her troubled teenage niece, she was smart and caring and in some cases she knew more about what was going on than the girl with the visions. Maybe if the two of them had worked together more as a team I would have found more to like in this book, but the aunt gets shunted to the side in favour of Chase.
The first two-thirds of the book were full of cliff-hangers, and I had a hard time putting it down. The story moved along at a good pace, and in spite of the occasional bout of confusion, the mysteries built on each other until about the last hundred pages or so, when Trinity decides to wander around aimlessly for awhile, trying to escape her problems. She wanders for quite a long time, avoiding both reality and her visions, and the story crawls to a stop. Unfortunately it never quite recovers from this, even when she finally puts the last piece of the puzzle together and the big hunt for both Jessica and the person who abducted her is on.
Ultimately Shattered Dreams is full of interesting ideas but fails to live up to its own promise. If we spent less time with the alleged love interest and more time actively working on they mystery I might have enjoyed this more, but the constant attempts to keep the reader in the dark were more frustrating than effective.
Shattered Dreams is available in trade paperback
. My copy was generously provided by the publisher.
*Nobody's real reaction to this cover, ever.