The Haunted by Jessica Verday

Plot

In the second book of this trilogy the reader finally starts to get some answers - but not until page 300.

Abbey returns from her Aunt's house, where she has been staying to get over the revelations about her boyfriend Caspian at the end of the previous book, to give a speech about her deceased best friend Kristen.

Once home Abbey tries her best to ignore Caspian but the inevitable happens and she finds herself back in Caspian's arms (if you've read the first book you know what I mean.) It was an obvious plot twist that I didn't appreciate the way it was written.

Something I didn't like about the plot was the lack of Kristen. The whole series started with Kristen's disappearance and the first book was filled with memories but in this book there's nothing. Caspian has replaced her, I just find that so unrealistic.

On the positive side this book had a brilliant climax, it was only a few pages long but it had tension, excitement and a truly inspiring twist.

Writing

In the last book the thing I loved the most was the writing and you'd think with another 467 pages of it I'd be positively delighted, but I wasn't. I opened the book and I was in heaven but the core of the book changed from grief to undying, eternal love and it wiped away the most human angle of the story for me.

Also i found the pacing to be really odd. Abbey just suddenly accepted Caspian when a more gradual approach (in my opinion) would have worked just as well if not better.

That doesn't mean I hated the book and the writing, I didn't, it just means that in my head I wanted it to go in a different direction.

Characters

First of all I still don't like Abbey and Caspian and with Kristen's memory practically erased, I was expecting to say that the characters awful and I spent my time wishing that I could dig ahole, throw them in it, and leave them there forever, but two things happened:

I adore Ben, in book 1 he had potential and in The Haunted it's realised. He's so cute and geeky and he loves onion flavoured crisps (Me too! Monster Munch are amazing!)

The other reason is an interesting new arrival called Vincent. I can't say much about him but I think I'm in love with him.

Therefore it's all good on the character front.

Overall

It's another solid read. Although I didn't like every aspect of the book and I was really critical of its flaws, I can kind of see where it's going and it could either equal a blinder of an ending or a bit of an obvious one. I still prefer book 1 though.

In the end I decided to give it three stars (as opposed to the 2.5 that I wanted to give it for the majority of time I was reading it.) because it had a brilliant ending that redeemed it a bit. I'd recommend it but there are as few swear words and some quite sexy scenes in there so maybe not for younger teens.

I got the image off Google, no copyright infringement is intended.