Oh my god.
This is the stupidest book I've read in while.
I wanted to like it so bad, that I just kept plowing through, which is not normally my M.O. I don't read books I don't like.
But this one...I don't know, I just kept hoping that it would get better.
Some character developement.
Some action.
Some romance.
Some intrigue.
ANYTHING.
To be fair, Lauryn April tried. I really believe that.
She tried to give us a love interest in Brant. She tried to give us some character growth with Ivy. She tried to give us some intrigue with the whole 'Someone's going to bomb the school' stuff. It just didn't work.
The writing is suprisingly good. Usually with this level of stupidity, there is bad dialog and horrible editing. On that note, we do have a plus.
Alright, lets talk about the book.
It starts off with Ivy sneaking into a private pool with her friends. She slips, falls in and hits her head. She likely has a bad concussion, but being teenagers who don't want to get in trouble, they all ignore this. She goes home, and soon starts hearing voices.
There is the standard "Oh my god, am I crazy?" stuff, but hearing thoughts is pretty easy to figure out.
Then comes the controlling it part. She can't. It gets bad one day in particular, and she passes out at school. Ohh, but first she hears the ominous " A month from now, they'll all be dead."
And now the stupidity begins.
The day after her fainting episode at school, she learns how to control her ability. Yep, it's just that simple. She looks up some meditating techniques, and it's a real lightbulb moment for her. She simply has to turn her ability on and off, like a light switch.
On Hear thought
Off No thoughts.
Well that was a fun challange for a day and a half.
Moving on. Brant, the bad boy at school, figured out her secret. They become tentitive friends, basically because he knows about her and no one else does. Thus, she should confide in him. Duh. That makes total sense. Why didn't I think of that?
Now onto stupid garbage that the rest of the book is about psycho who is going to kill everyone.
Obviously, they need to find him. Their guy was kind enough to give them a timeline in his thoughts, so they know they have until the end of the month.
That's like, freaking forever for these teenagers. Why bother with it now?
Lets hang out. Get to know each other. Hang out some more. Maybe kiss. Lets not talk about the guy who's building a bomb when we don't want heaviness to interrupt out light mood.
Gah. I wanted to punch them both in the face.
When they're not avoiding the problem altogether, they're coming up with the dumbest plans in history.
Hey, that creepy kid with the dredlocks supposedly skinned a cat. I bet he's totally the guy behind this bomb. Problem solved.
This is their idea of dudiligence. Lets pick someone we think might be behind this sinister plot, go question them, and see if their mental voices match up.
After they'd ruled out their Two, count them, TWO suspects, nothing really happens for most of the book.
They have an idea to look up people who may have checked out bomb making books from the library, and end up having to wait a week until the computers are fixed. Oh well, guess there's nothing else they can do in the mean time.
Okay, that's enough of my ranting about that. Basically, they're the dumbest teenagers that I've ever read about. If Ivy had a motto, it would be What should we do now?.
That's basically her question after every one of the rediculous attempts to find this guy.
Another huge problem I had was that once she's figured out how to shut off her mind reading, she very rarely uses it. She either doesn't want to hear the thoughts of people around her, no matter how benificial that would be in say Fiding the guy planning to blow up the school.
It's almost like the author forgets that she gave Ivy this ability for most of the book, and then she'll throw in random thoughts to be like Hey, don't forget she can do this!. It's rediculous.
At one point, her 8 year old sister is missing. Did not come home. They don't know what's happend to her, if she's okay, yadda yadda. Ivy and her friends decide to walk the neghbourhood. Yes, walk. Calmly. Not calling Sadie's name. Just taking a nice leisurly stroll and hoping to stuble across her. I guess I should give the author props for being consistant.
Ivy of course, does not use her talent to scan around for her sister.
I don't know if it doesn't occur to her, or if it didn't occur to the author.
Really, it's like Lauryn April gave her this talent simply to be able to introduce the 'conflict' and then didn't want it to be a major part of the book.
That was dissapointing, because the mind reading aspect was a big part of why I was interested in this book.
The cincher to why I hated Into the Deep was really the characters.
They petty, shallow and have such a lack of substance and over abundance of cowardice that it's hard to take the book seriously, let alone enjoy it.
Read at your own risk.