Bound by Prophecy

So I knew going into this that it’s a YA romance so I wasn’t expecting something really deep and philosophical. A girl likes her guilty-pleasure reads every now and again, this wedding planning lady especially. I was kind of hoping for a plot that would catch my attention and something to tug a lil at the ol’heartstrings.

Nope! It wasn’t even a good no-brainer book. I felt like without the synopsis I wouldn’t have understood things at all. In truth there was a kind of sub-par fanfic feel about the whole thing. Like the author assumes you have a lot more knowledge about the world and the events than we actually do. Fanfic, or maybe an excerpt from a larger piece of work. One with some back story.
Coming in at only 163 pages it is definitely short, even for YA which honestly tends to get a bit long at times. And short isn’t necessarily bad. I adore Wrinkle in Time and it’s pretty short, although even that book is about 40 pages more than this one. Wright could have done a lot with those additional pages, and she probably should have.

Instead of experiencing any emotional investment, or even shock/horror at some of the events of The Big Climax I just kind of passively went through it. Perhaps it’s pacing, the beginning really dragged for me, probably because I had no clue wtf even happened. True story, I thought Aern was a chick for the first.. I dunno 40 pages or so? (Yes I know the cover is a girl and boy but anyway). That kind of sums up the whole book actually. You’re not ever given enough information to really truly know what’s going on.

The entire book they talk about Commonbloods, which is fairly easy to figure out are plain old Muggles. But then there’s this other group. Except, what are they? Not vampires far as I can tell… although there’s a lot of similarities. There’s some kind of inconsistent rules about how they can heal, and this thing about a prophet and a Council. But honestly… I don’t know. And then there’s this whole thing about Others I think, which are some kind of Elder/Ancients type deal who we can manage to backhandedly figure out were a whole lot more powerful than the ones we currently have, whatever they are.

Overall I think it lacks the polish that a finished book should have. It’s like an early draft where the author was just trying to get it all written down before she forget and meant to go add in details later, and then just decided to publish it as-is. On a hunch I went and confirmed the publisher, Createspace. Sadly this book is every stereotypical bad thing that readers and authors have to say about self publishing, bad grammar and spelling mistakes included.

The verdict? While it’s not offensive in any way (which is an accomplishment for YA fic let me tell you!), and thus not deserving of the 1-star hate-rate… it’s honestly only about a 1.5.

Give it a pass.