The Fallen Star

Have you ever finished reading a book and sighed because you were thankful it was over? Well, that's what I did when I finished reading The Fallen Star. I guess I can't be too disappointed since this book was free, but I've read some of Jessica Sorensen's "new adult contemporary" books (that's a mouthful), and while they weren't the best books I've ever read, they weren't the worst either -- just good, trashy fun -- and I guess that's what I was expecting from The Fallen Star.

Nope. Wrong.

So what's this book about? I think you can guess from the title. But more specifically, a teenager named Gemma who has weird violet eyes and has never felt emotion until one day she feels a "prickling sensation" on the back of her neck, and has her first real human emotion. According to Gemma, "it was weird," and her life was never the same after that. She lives with her cold, always pissed off grandparents who won't ever talk about her dead parents, or really anything important. And then she meets the new guy at school, Alex, and feels all of these crazy, new emotions. Which would be great, if Alex didn't act like he hated her. And then the secrets -- and near-death experiences -- keep coming. It looks like little Gemma has a star's energy inside her. Oh, and she's the key to saving the world. No big deal.

I think it was the whole star element that made me decide I'd give this book a shot. There's only so many stories about angels, demons, vampires, witches, and fairies that you can read without hating them all.

Oh wait, this book has all of those characters, too. Fantastic.

If you've read Cassandra Clare's books, this feels like a bad take of her Shadowhunter world. There's even tattoos. I mean, I get the appeal. Clare is having a lot of success with her weird, overly populated world, but The Fallen Star's world was just bad. And cheap.

This book was plagued with terrible dialogue and a lack of characters. Or good characters. Alex isn't that much older than Gemma, but at some times, he acts like he's her parent, and then he goes back to jealous boyfriend/protector. And since I don't have daddy issues, it wasn't an attractive trait. At one point in the story, Alex is stressing out because he can't contact the 3 other people he knows. If he's part of this society that protects the world from things that aren't supposed to exist, wouldn't there be more people he'd know, more people that could tell him what to do? I guess not. My mistake.

And the Death Walkers. They are supposed to be so incredibly scary and evil (obviously, with a name like Death Walkers). Well, they weren't. For being demons or whatever, they were pretty stupid and really sucked at playing hide and seek. I don't know about you, but if I'm looking for some teenager that I could suck the soul out of, I'd definitely look in all of the closed bedrooms first. The ending -- which was full of Death Walkers -- was supposed to be dramatic and intense, but it felt rushed and stale. When someone says, "You're going to let him detach my soul," it seems like you should really care if it happens or not.

Meh. Gemma used the word "prickle" so many times that maybe if her soul got detached, she'd learn how to use a thesaurus. 

This book ends in a kind of annoying, sort of cliff hanger. But since we're all logical beings with brains, you can figure out what doesn't happen in the next book. I won't be reading it.