After giving Uninvited a rather harsh review, I was truly hoping that I would be able to read Revealers by Amanda Marrone and sing its praises. But alas, it was not to be. I hate it when I don’t like books because typically, loving books is what I do best. However, I find that most of the time it’s better to be honest than to barf sunshine all the time. So here it goes.
The gist of the story is that Jules, along with her other gal pals in a strange coven, spends her nights dusting other mythical creatures–vampires, werewolves, faeries, etc. Of course, they have been trained from birth to believe these other beings are innately evil and were created to torment all of mankind. However, the girls later learn that they are basically pawns in a larger witchy mafia in which their leaders (their mothers, of all people) are being paid to take out hits on other creatures. Oh yeah, and the best part is that their mothers all sold their daughters’ souls to demons as a part of a strange witch covenant that I still don’t quite understand now that I’ve read (and reread some parts) the book. So of course, the girls have to figure out how to win their souls back to crush the vicious cycle of demonic enslavement. Sounds like a halfway decent plot line, right? Too bad it was poorly executed.
I feel the main problem with Revealers is that Marrone spent far too long revealing unnecessary details like: …hmmm…will tonight be the night for sex with my boyfriend? Gee, golly, I sure hope he has a condom. Instead of trying to be a walking public service announcement for safe and responsible sex, Marrone should most definitely have focused more on her ending, which was, in all honesty, the most anti-climactic ending I’ve ever read. For the first seventy or so pages of the novel, Marrone focuses almost entirely on the coven’s suffocating rules against dating instead of jumping into the plot. I get that Connor and Jules wanted to be together physically, but should that really have taken seventy pages to explain? And really, the details were quite unnecessary. I would much rather have seen a better ending to the book.
In fact, just when I was finally hooked into the plot (which was, sadly, not until the last fifty pages of the novel), and I was actually pumped for this big, problem solving or even potentially violent ending, the whole thing went kaput. Much to my dismay, Jules negotiates, and Connor and his evil mommy are zapped away to hell. It all happens in two paragraphs. What?! I blinked and it was over. At any rate, there isn’t much more to say, other than it could have been so much better.
Once again, I hate to write a poor review, but Revealers, in my opinion left much to be desired, and I’m somewhat ashamed I wasted ten bucks at Books A Million when I could have bought something better.
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