Confessions of a Literary Addict

This review is spoiler-free!

Unhinged by A.G. Howard
Series: Splintered #2
Genres: Fantasy, Young Adult, Retelling
Release Date: January 7th 2014 by Amulet Books
Format: Paperback, 381 pages
Rating: ★★☆☆☆
Find it here: Goodreads || Book Depository

Sweet baby Jesus, that was quite the second book slump.

I wouldn’t say I had the HIGHEST of hopes for this second book since I wasn’t a huge fan of the first, but to say the bar was as low as it probably should have been would be a little bit of a lie. I felt like the first book set up the story pretty well for what I expected to happen in the second book, but then it just… didn’t.

Well, okay. It kind of did. At the end. Everything up to that point was just a long line of “but why this” running through my brain. Like. I didn’t care. At all. Even a little, about what was happening with Alyssa and her annoying boyfriend Jeb and her creepy former friend Morpheus. I only really cared about the last third of the book when things started to really happen, which are not great statistics.

The ONLY reason this is getting two stars instead of one is because I still firmly stand by my previous statement that Howard is a very good writer. Description-wise, at least. Plot? Still not sure about that one, because while I enjoyed all the parts without romance, the romance and the tropes within the romance basically shot me dead in my own backyard. I hated them so much. And they all were in the first two-thirds of the book with a heavy concentration at the start. I am here for Alice in Wonderland madness — not teenaged jealousy and drama that has literally nothing to do with the plot aside from creating a boring plot dilemma that ends up spanning almost the entire book.

I don’t know. With how it ended, I once again have unfortunately high hopes (well, mediocre hopes, I guess) for how the last book will go. I’m thinking maybe it’ll be what I had hoped the second book would have been. But! We’ll find out when we get there, I guess.

Thanks for reading!