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One of the worst books I've read so far in 2011, second only after Spells in stupidity. I suppose this is another case of a book with a decent concept, but incredibly weak execution of said concept. My main gripe with this book was that it just bored me out of my mind. I am not usually a skimmer. I tend to read slowly, and really absorb each word and sentence, but this book just had me itching to skim through large sections. Boredom aside, I found the characters and dialogue quite wooden, and the entire plot was rife with cliches.

The so-called "romance" between the protag and his love interest was ridiculous, cheesy and bland. The love interest was the stereotypical, perfect, gorgeous, personality-less, blue-eyed, ivory-skinned blonde. She seemed to be valued mainly for her looks, as the reader has it hammered over their head over and over again that she is "the most beautiful girl John had ever seen" blah blah etc etc. I suppose she was also valued for her supposed "goodness", which was demonstrated to the reader only in the most banal, cliche ways (ie. she works at an animal shelter! she is semi-nice to the school outcast!). At one point she was actually described as "fluttering her eyelashes" at him. I mean, c'mon, who actually does that?

I just had no interest in any of the characters. I couldn't feel anything for them. They all seemed like teenage cliches, not real people. In fact, the whole book had a distinctly teenagerish feel, which is not necessarily a bad thing for a book to be and completely understandable considering it's YA, but that doesn't mean it has to suck. I enjoy plenty of YA and children's books, but this one was just.. I don't know.. immature? Unsophisticated? One-dimensional? Too commercial?

The writing was serviceable, although again, very bland and uninspired. Plus, there are some pretty questionable ethical issues when it comes to the "authoring" of this book and whether the author who wrote the bulk of it was fairly compensated. See for more info. I wasn't at all surprised to learn about the conditions that the book was written under, as that's exactly what it reads like - some kind of mass-produced, commercial product coming out of a YA-book-trend factory. There's no handmade flourishes, no artistry and no heart. It's like they just grabbed a bunch of cliches and popular YA trends - a love triangle, magic powers, etc. and clumsily assembled them together. That's not writing, it's a tragedy.