November 23, 2012

Envy by Gregg Olsen {Review}


Publisher: Splinter
Publish Date: August 23, 2011
Source: Publisher for honest review
Goodreads

Crime lives -- and dies -- in the deceptively picture-perfect town of Port Gamble (a.k.a "Empty Coffin"), Washington. Evil lurks and strange things happen -- and 15-year-olds Hayley and Taylor Ryan secretly use their wits and their telepathic "twin sense" to uncover the truth about the town's victims and culprits.
Envy, sadly, didn’t captivate me.

Envy takes third-person omniscient to the extreme. The book followed so many characters that I had trouble remembering them all and keeping their names straight. I understand what Olsen was trying to do in getting all the side-stories to come together in the end to provide a clear picture, but it just didn’t do that for me. I got bored and distracted by all the side-stories constantly wondering when I was actually going to find out anything about Katelyn’s death.

The mystery wasn’t all that captivating in and of itself either. First of all, I found almost everything unconvincing since they ruled the girl’s death an accident due to espresso machine. Maybe I know nothing and some people really do make coffee in their bedrooms or bathrooms, but it just seemed completely absurd to me. Another thing that didn’t really work for me was The Accident. It was constantly being built up and built up and then it just seemed to amount to very little.

Another thing that bothered me was the fact that it’s classified as YA but despite the fact that it has quite a few teenaged characters it often felt more Adult. Characters were often talking about the sex lives of the adults in town and their secret behind-closed-doors lives. It didn’t really work for me.
The Nutshell: My opinions are my own, so someone else might not have the same issues as I did, but I still have to say that I won’t be recommending Envy.

Pages: 285
Series: Empty Coffin #1
Rating: Miss

1 comment:

  1. Bummer, I was looking forward to this one, but I think I would have a lot of the same problems you did with this read. I'm always struggling to enjoy a third person perspective, then mutilple perspectives usually don't work for me unless the author does it well. Then, I ususally end up tolerating it.

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