*sigh* I really wanted to love this book. I really did. The beginning trapped me and I thought there was no getting out. But, I found a window and crawled right out of it. First, let's go through the positives and without giving too much away. I liked the storyline. What was happening in the world was a pretty scary thought and I was very interested in seeing what would happen next. The idea of the Keepers coming in and keeping people safe was good too. I liked that there was an otherworldy being on our side. I liked Danny's character in the beginning because he felt very real to me, typical little slacker. I liked the interest Merrick had in Sherry... to begin with.
Then suddenly, I was getting annoyed with our main character. Sherry was supposed to be intelligent. At least I thought. She started to feel very dense to me. There were situations I felt should have been obvious, they were too obvious, and she still seemed to be in la-la land completely oblivious. I kept yelling, "come on Sherry!" at my Kindle. Her age also bothered me. She was 18-19 and had supposedly been to college? Did she graduate early or something? Did she not finish? Also, she was only a year older than Danny and yet more than once there was mention of her telling her mother to hold his head when he was an infant. Um, my kids are 15 months apart, my daughter was talking when baby brother came along, but she wasn't old enough to know that you have to hold a baby's head up. Maybe there should have been a few more years between them?
There were several things that bothered me. These Keepers are immortals. The prologue led me to believe this isn't their first battle with evil, so why do so many things keep stunning them? They should be more prepared than they are. Most of the book seemed to be about hiding and the love story. It was a bit too uneventful for an end-of-world story. Then the book seemed to have ended mid paragraph and that was strange, I thought a page was missing and was very disappointed.
Besides all that, this is the second time I've read a book that had the potential to be a five star, but was ruined with the lack of editing. I'm not picky, I don't need a perfect book. I can overlook a few typos, I make mistakes too. However, when errors are distracting me from the story... I have a problem. I got to a point where I started highlighting.
There was a kid who was seven years old and a few months (like 20 pages) later, he was ten. There were two different characters with the same name. This wouldn't have been a big deal with names like Sarah, or Jennifer, you know, common names. A name like Racine is rare and it confused me to meet the second Racine. There was also a statement made that surprised Sherry when it shouldn't have, because she was surprised by a similar statement a few pages before. There was a remark referring to a meeting that had never been mentioned before. The grammatical errors... so many errors. There was also A LOT of switching between present and past tense... even mid sentence. It made me crazy a few times...
Here are some spoiler-free examples:
"or to leave because their... well special" their instead of they're
"Maybe Bobby would see all it and get a clue" um.. what???
"We must have driven for quite a while because, I wake up with my head on Merrick's lap." tense change
"him was pressed against my back," uh.. you mean he?
"pulled me more tighter into his arms." more tighter??
"Marissa seemed to be different that when she first came." than?
"We have no idea where we were going." tense change
"I refused to release Merrick's hand as we make our exit." tense change
With the tense changes, it seemed like it was written in one tense and someone came along and tried to change it to the other tense but didn't thoroughly go over it to make sure it all matched. It happened at least three times on each page. I tried to ignore it, I couldn't. I had to reread some sentences to get what was happening.
Like I said, I really wanted to love this, it was an interesting idea, but along the way, I kept getting sidetracked and it bugged me more and more. I will read the second book for a few reasons. For one, I'm hoping the second one had better editing, for two, I "hear" the series gets better, and for three, I'm a sucker for series and HAVE to know what happens next. Given that this one just ended in the middle of a paragraph and left me hanging, I'm kind of pulling my hair out. I really hope the series gets better. This wasn't the only book from this author I bought with it and I will be reluctant to read the other if this series fails me. So, onto book 2!