(purchased from Barnes and Noble nook store)
The author contacted me via my facebook page for this blog. I went onto the nook bookstore and purchased and downloaded Forgotten for review here. The author just asked if I would be willing to read and review one of her books. She had no influence on the book I selected for that purpose.
Gwyneth has been in the foster care system since she was a baby, after she and her family were attacked. Her parents and sister were murdered and Gwyneth was blinded. She can see some shapes and shadows, but that is it. We first meet Gwyneth when she is bowling with her best friend, Bree, and the best friend's boyfriend, Ryker. Gwyneth and Ryker have one of those weird combative relationships that just make everyone uncomfortable. I had a hard time feeling bad for Gwyneth, but I did feel bad for Bree.
Gwyneth was a difficult character to like. I get that she's got all these hardships, but in the aftermath she wound up with a family that loves her, a best friend that takes excellent care of her and other resources to grow stronger and feel safe. The narration claims that she has visions, but technically, she only really has two visions. One is about what happened the day her family was killed and the other, she believes is about her death, and in the vision she is a very old lady. This could have been fairly interesting, except that the author either couldn't think of enough content to fill the book, or she thought her audience too stupid to remember the content of the visions. There was not a single chapter of this book that didn't include the full description of one or both of the visions. It was like being beat over the head with them.
The point of constantly referring in detail to the exact descriptions previously given, was to show how Gwyneth was learning what they meant. Despite that rational reason, it was still overkill. What reader wants to be constantly beat over the head with the exact same passages? I'm currently reading Pepper's The Death of the Mad Hatter and have come to the conclusion that this style of constantly repeating one idea, verbatim is a thing with her. I'm not seeing it quite so often as I did in Forgotten, which is a blessing. However, I'm not even halfway through the book and I've got the thing memorized. Clearly, I didn't need that many reminders.
It wasn't even the visions that were mercilessly repeated, there were so many turns of phrase that were used in the exact same way over and over. Gwyneth is part of a group of deities, or immortal beings, possibly one of the fates. The person she is thought to be by the romantic interest, Jace and the group of people that show up at the same time, has the ability to find the string with a person's life and manipulate it. If I had to read about her finding the string "with her smallest finger" one more time, I was going to scream. The book was 291 pages on my nook, but at least a third of them were comprised totally of the few things the author repeated verbatim.
This was a disappointing read and it was only my second book in the Clean Out Your E-Reader challenge. I really wish this book had worked for me. I read to the end, hoping something would appeal to me, but it never happened.
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