Book 1 in the new Gilded Wings series
AUTHOR: Aimee Agresti
PUBLISHED: 2012
CATEGORY: YA
GENRE: Urban fantasy, drama
PREMISE: Haven gets a exclusive internship at a hotel and gets caught up in a strange world...
MY REVIEW: Warning: I pretty much loathed this book. So much of this post will be ranting. Now I will point out that yes, this book wasn't meant to be literature or anything. I also will admit some of the stuff with the souls and the allusions to The Picture of Dorian Grey were nice. But none of that is enough to make up for a writer who...is not good. Or at the very least needed much editing.
First of all, like I said, the writing is not good. There were lots of misused theosaurus words clearly put in to try and impress the reader but looked terribly out of place. If I could cut out all the redundant sentaces and useless chapters/scenes the book would seriously be about three hundred pages less. Don't get me started on the really bad dialogue in it. The pacing is so slow and the book winds up being frankly dull. Then there are the extremely one-dimensional characters. Haven is a flat Mary Sue, Dante is a walking gay stereotype (I like LGBT characters and all, but please don't make them stereotypes and definitely don't just have them there to be the funny gay best friend and nothing more), both love interests are so boring I don't even remember their names a week later. Then it's just littered with tropes upon tropes and thus it's predictable and half the things going on in it are so ridiculous I don't know where to begin.
This book wasn't offensive or anything (other then the gay stereotyping) but I personally felt insulted. I mean, does Agresti really think this is all teens/YA readers require in their books to make it a best seller? Throw in a paint-by-numbers plot and you're golden? I do understand were she may have gotten the idea considering what's been selling but still, this is just not even trying to be orginal. It felt like a big unedited NaNo novel that was written on a whim. I'm sorry but I like for my books to show some effort in them. This may not be the worst thing ever written, but it sure is kind of insulting to the reader.
WHO SHOULD READ: Twilight fans I guess, but I think even patient Twihards may get slightly insulted by having the character explain everything to them.
MY RATING: One and a half out of Five ridiculous plots
Oh, gosh, I'm sorry that you hated this book so much! I quite liked the concept and the cover, but hearing this.. I think I'll need to re-think if I will read this one. Thanks for your honesty.
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