Top critical review
2.0 out of 5 starsGood premise but dumbed down
Reviewed in the United States on December 3, 2016
This book's premise definitely has potential, but unfortunately it's not very well done. Just because it's a YA aimed for teenagers, about a teenager girl, doesn't mean you have to dumb it down, and often here I felt like I was reading some form of fan fiction instead of a well thought novel that went through an editor. The writing is awfully shallow, and everything that could have been interesting gets lost in the cliches.
Let's start with Clarity. She's an interesting heroine, although at times she feels like a bad copy of Veronica Mars. She's also one of those girls that complains about not being liked by anyone, yet every single young guy that appears in the book seems interested in her. Her power --being able to get visions from the past from touching an object-- is cool, but it's severely underused in the book, to the point it sometimes feels like the author forgot her character is supposed to be psychic. Example: the tires of her mom's car get slashed. Instead of touching them to see if she can get a vision of who did it, she asks around if anyone saw someone suspicious.
In this story, Clarity gets "recruited" by her ex boyfriend to work in a murder case in which her brother turns out to be the likely suspect. I honestly tried really hard to suspend disbilief and get into the idea that the mayor and the detective of the town would let three teenagers work semi-officially in a criminal investigation, but it's just so ridiculous. They just go around in crime scenes, messing with evidence... just no. The resolution to the mystery is also badly done, coming in the five last pages, and very foreseeable just because there doesn't seem to be any other reason why this particular character keeps showing up everywhere when they have nothing to do with the plot. Not to mention all the ridiculous red herrings thrown around, but they just feel like cheap devices to fool the reader. I doubt any reader would be fooled.
The love triangle is pretty boring, with one of the guys being mostly eye candy and the protagonist just mentioning all his physical attributes as to why she's attracted to him. Very poor character development. Why are we supposed to get invested in this? I'm not sure.
Also her brother is a medium, which is pretty cool, yet this power is barely used twice in the book. What a waste.
I gave this book two stars because it was a fairly entertaining read and it had some good points, but I really think it could have been so much better. I don't think I'll bother with the sequel.