The Treachery of Beautiful Things

There's a danger in how I shop for books. If a book at Goodreads sounds even slightly interesting, I'll usually preview it over at Amazon with their ‘look inside' feature and, because I buy most of my books over the internet, that's often the only time I gat to see what the writing is like. I use this both to see what point of view is used, as well as checking to make sure the story isn't told in present tense. While there are some benefits to this, there is also the danger of a smashing first few pages that quickly fall in to boring sameness.

Like this book.

The preview starts with chapter one - skipping the prologue - and was immediately enthralled with the book. However, by the time I reached chapter four in the copy I bought, I was already starting to get a little tired of it.

While the writing is beautiful and evocative, it was also too verbose. Everything had to be long winded. The paragraphs are huge chunks of text. After awhile, I got really bored of it. The author did shine, however, writing the creepy scenes - special warning here for people that are terrified of spiders. I personally am not, but I do hate them and there was an extended scene in here that left me feeling like my skin was crawling.

Jenny was annoying in her blindness. She was very oblivious to...pretty much everything and reacted in a purely emotional way - which means I automatically disliked her and couldn't sympathize with her. She's got this mentality that if she sticks her head into the sand everything will be okay. She constantly was putting herself in danger through stupid actions and needing to be rescued.

I think I would have like Jack, if not for him being the romantic lead. He was tortured, but a rather nice, sweet guy at heart. Of course, he does commit one of my big pet peeves in that he keeps way too many secrets. A good portion of the drama would be non-existent if he would have just told Jenny things instead of being so darn uncommunicative - which really only made things worse. (Matters would have also been helped had she been smart enough to pick up on the huge clues that were dropped.)

However, there were a few romance scenes between these two that were very sweet - when neither of them were being an idiot.

Honestly, for me this book was like those reality tv shows I used to watch. There was little for me to actually like about the book - and taken in an objective manner, I really didn't like it. However, for some reason I couldn't put the darn thing down. There was just something about this book that made it very readable, even when I was aware that there was no good reason for me to keep reading it.

(Originally posted on my blog: http://pagesofstarlight.blogspot.com/)