Warning: Rageful rant ahead, may contain major spoilers
"But I don't.
I can't.
I can't stop myself and I don't want to.
You have to choose, I think, You have chosen, I think.
Choose Lucas.
Slowly, I pull the tie on my binding.
We've never finished this. And I want to be with him."
What are we talking about? You guessed it. A love triangle.
If that alone didn't make you want to gouge your eyes out trying reading four hundred pages of this shit. As you may have guessed, I have a lot to say.
Sit tight kids, this is gonna be a long ride.
So to start, the premise is that there are these kids called Icons that have special powers. The main character, Dol, is trying to start the revolution and rise up against these alien lords in a futuristic world.
Actually, scratch that. The premise is: there is a love triangle.
Who will Dol pick? The hotheaded and fiery Ro? Or Lucas, who has no personality? Newsflash: I DON'T CARE!
Every time Dol sat around having inner arguments with herself about who to chose, I wanted to throw this book at a wall. I couldn't since I was in a public place, so I just scribbled rage notes in my book and showed them to my friend, who was laughing her ass off at how stupid this sounded.
"A young girl in bright orange robes with a lightning shock of spiky white-blond hair, skin the color of wet sand, and icy green, almond shaped eyes..."
What the fuck?
When the last time you met someone with spiky white-blond hair or someone with 'skin the color of wet sand', much less someone with both? What would that even look like?
Can someone explain to me what is wrong with Margaret Stohl's publishers? Why would they publish this?
Why was everything in size 18 font? To make it longer? It just made it feel amateur to me.
Why was 20% of the book italicized? That bugged me so much.
Now the 'plot'.
I couldn't follow anything that was happening in this book. We jumped around too much, so I ended up skimming some parts that didn't make any sense.
I said in my review of the first book that maybe it had a good concept at first, but I take that back. This is completely cliche and unoriginal in every aspect.
The characters were the same. Dol annoyed me in so many ways and was one of the worst main characters I've ever read from. Ro and Lucas were stereotypical and didn't interest me in any way. And don't get me started on that robot that kept trying to be cute and clever and talking about technology. That was almost worse than the love triangle.
Hey, that just reminded me. You know what was worse than the love triangle? The writing!
The sentences are short and choppy. I feel like an 11 year old wrote this! The descriptions were really weird and there were cursing substitutes, one of my pet peeves (ie. brassholes).
Not to mention the ONE LINERS! Half this freaking book was one liners! If we took out the one liners and inner dialogues we would have a 100 page book.
And the ending. My god.
Margaret threw in all these plot twists, but they were completely predictable and I saw them coming a mile away and I was just skimming by that point.
So instead of Dol just choosing someone, one of the guys she was choosing between sacrifices himself for the group and dies. That's right. The author couldn't just have Dol choose. It would be easier to just kill one of them off.
As far as the ending went, I had no idea what was going on, but as much as it pains me to say, it looks like there could be a third...
"I'm not best friend to Furo Costas. Not anymore. He's dead, as dead as the Lord who took him.
I should know. My heart died with him.
Which also means I'm not girlfriend to Lucas Amare. Not anymore. I'm too broken for that."
You guys, that is a legit quote from the epilogue. I was laughing so hard at that.
Perfect set up for the next book. Here's how I'm sure it'll go: Dol mourns Ro while trying to save the world and repair her relationship with Lucas and then finds out that Ro isn't really dead and must resume choosing between the two boys who love her.
Okay, got my rage out. I don't usually hate on books, but this one was really, really bad. I don't hate the author, in fact I actually enjoyed some of her other books, but I've just gotta say, this series isn't worth your time.