Woman Reading

I'm so disappointed.

Based off the synopsis, and a particular review, I was pretty excited to read this book. It sounded amazing, and I still think that the concept is brilliant. I just think, maybe the execution was lacking.

Eva is an Echo. She has been stitched together with a bit of essence from Amarra, the girl whose life Eva will step into if Amarra passes away. Everything Amarra goes through Eva has to learn about it. Any changes to Amarra's appearance (with the exception of accidental scars) Eva has to adopt them. She has to be a perfect replica of her 'other'. Except that Echo's are born/created with personalities of their own, and they have people who've taken care of them, in Eva's case even loved them. What a beautiful thought provoking idea that is...

Let's break this book down into it's Parts, because it's easier for me to review that way.

Part One:

In part one we get Eva's life with her Guardians, her daily living, and the methods used to teach Eva about Amarra's life. It was beautiful, and in this part of the book I was 4 stars, all the way. In the beginning Eva is 15 and she's got connections and a family. It seems to be a happy, despite the loneliness, existence. Eva bends the rules and she's allowed to be her own person even while she's taking on the responsibility of being an Echo. I loved this section.

Part Two:

Eva's life with her 'familiars', meaning Amarra's family after her untimely death. Mmmmm, this wasn't as good to me. But still, I was around 3 stars. Eva is there for 10 months, and in that time builds a friendship, tiptoes around Ray Amarra's boyfriend, grows to love Amarra's siblings, and tries to handle the grief of Amarra's parents. It was up and down, and I just kind of felt like there were a lot of things happening in this section that were just sort of dropped. I see no sign that there will be a sequel, so now there are all these loose ends (cough* Ray *cough) that I don't think will ever be explained. 

Part Three:

The climax... Well, I'm not going to to give a synopsis on this, since it's something that isn't discussed in the book blurb and I don't want to give anything away. I'll just say that this is when the review dropped to 2 stars. Everything felt so rushed and thrown together. Nothing was actually explained while everything was sorting itself out. I say sorting itself out loosely because with the exception of ONE thing, nothing was actually sorted out at all... at least I didn't think so. And what's with that effing ending?!

I liked Eva, she was unique which I find rare in female characters. I really liked Sean. Hell, I think I pretty much loved all the characters actually. That even includes Matthew. See, I just have this problem ... I can't handle a book that is 97% depressing, and I felt like Lost Girl was. Very little happy happened in this book, it was horrible moment right after horrible moment. And even in the end I feel like we were just left with sadness. I'm sure that there are readers out there who love this, but for me if I'm sad the whole time and it's not balanced with a bit of joy then I find that in the end I just don't care. I need moments of joy to really feel or care about the sadness. Two great examples of this would be The Fault in Our Stars and On the Jellicoe Road. Give me a reason to care about these people! Now, to be fair, in part one there were moments that I was smiling and happy, but it felt like as the book progressed it got less and less. The book changed. In the end I didn't like what it became.

I think, well I think too that the problem may have been that the book just wasn't long enough. Eva went from 15 years old to 18 years old in 438 pages. There were so many time jumps and so many things glossed over that I think maybe shouldn't have been. Why did Eva have to age 2 1/2 years in this book? Why couldn't she have been 17 in the beginning? Give us her history in flashbacks. Or, if the author needed to have her age that much, why not split part 1, 2 and 3 into 3 books? I'm not a 'series reader' or a 'standalone reader'. I'm a 'what works' reader. Crazy was an ammmmazzzzing standalone book, it had a great pacing. Whereas the Chaos Walking Trilogy could never have been told in one book. Lost Girl falls in the latter, it felt like too much was packed into too little and it left me feeling cramped.

And with that, we're brought back around to disappointment. I was really looking forward to this one. Such promise....