This the book that has been sucking my life away for the last month or so. I usually try to finish a book a week. This one took way too long. For one thing, it was slightly longer than most books I read. For another, the first 65% of the book was boring--and I couldn't get through it. Rather than rushing through other tasks to read, I by-passed reading to do anything else (like sort socks, scrub the toilet, or watch paint dry.) I'm glad I didn't give up because the ending turned out pretty good. But I'm still not sure it was worth it.
I'd like to say I won't include any spoilers, but in this one, that's hard to do. From the beginning, we already know that Meara's dad is some mysterious sea creature. We can figure that out from reading the "about" section or from reading the first page. It takes Meara a lot longer to realize this for some crazy reason.
You'll want to like Meara when you find out her mom is dying of cancer, and she has to move to Canada to stay with her grandparents during her mom's final days. You'll be happy when she makes friends and meets a cute guy. But she also does a lot of other things that kinda make you think she's a bit of a jerk. You'll see what I'm talking about. You also kind of have to wonder how slow she is that she hasn't figured out what's going on with her dad or when he starts mysteriously appearing to her why she accepts his ridiculous answers of "just wait, you'll see" why I've been gone for seventeen years, why I can talk to you in dreams, why I can magically show up in your bedroom. "Oh, okay. I'll just wait then. Thanks." (Not exact quotes, but you get it.)
Many of the characters are extremely flat, which is a shame because there was an opportunity to do so much with some of them, especially the magical ones. The boyfriend is the typical all-star athlete, straight A student that all the girls want. The best friend is "like, totally whatever...." Lots of cliches. Too many cliches. Even the dying mother is a cliche.
Something else that really bothered me is that this book is published through a publishing house, Clean Teen Publishing. It does not list a specific editor, but I'm really shocked that, first of all, they didn't reduce the first 45% of the book to about 20% and that, second of all, they don't have better proofreaders. There are a lot of typos, misspelled words, etc. in here that I would expect to see from an Indie author who possibly hired someone on Fiverr to proofread for them (not knocking that--I have edited several books that way myself) but if you work at a publishing house as a publisher and you don't notice when the author calls the boyfriend Even instead of Evan or leaves words out of sentences, or leaves letters out of words that make the tense incorrect, uhm, that's a problem. I hope this isn't a vanity press and that Ms. Risser didn't pay these people to publish this for her because if she did, she should consider getting her money back. And if it's a legitimate publisher, they should look into hiring new editors. Seriously.
All that being said, the last 25-30% of the book was really good. If I was jut ranking that portion, I would have given it five stars. I am tempted to read the second installment to see if it is as good as the end of this one, but I'm not sure I want to take the risk of sitting through another 65% of how Meara painted a dock and what sweater Katie wanted to pick out for her boyfriend to test it out. Maybe if it's free and the other 2000 books on my kindle account suddenly disappear.
I honestly hate to be so negative. I really don't feel like it's necessarily Ms. Risser's fault that the end product ended up the way that it did. She was supposed to have help, and in my opinion, they didn't do their job. If you'd like to try this one, seriously skip to about halfway, and you won't miss anything important that you can't figure out. It may be worth it.
If you'd like to see for yourself, you can buy Never Forgotten here and the current list price is FREE (might be a reason for that.) You can read my 3 star review here. I will note that this book does have a 4.4 average review with 123 reviews, so other people do like it.
Has anyone else read it? What did you think?
