Vesper (Deviants, #1)

Vesper by Jeff Sampson

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


1.5 stars

Well, color me disappointed. I’ll try to keep this short and very clear: I expected a lot form Vesper. Perhaps I was curious because a male author wrote from a teenage girl’s perspective - it usually works so well when it’s the other way around (case in point: White Cat or Anna Dressed in Blood). That’s not something that happens very often and I wanted to find out if it worked. It didn’t. I feel like I’ve wasted a lot of time and got nothing but annoyance in return.

Emily Webb is a horribly insecure 16-year-old. She only has one friend, she rarely leaves the house unless it’s to go to school and she avoids confrontations at all costs. One night her classmate Emily Cooke gets shot and dies and, at the same time, our Emily starts behaving very strangely. The two things are seemingly unconnected, but as Emily experiences complete change of personality night after night, she starts suspecting that the other Emily found a way to possess her.

Suddenly she’s sneaking out the window every night, crashing parties and judging people by their smell. A small voice inside her head is making her do things she never even thought of doing before. She is stronger and faster at night, nothing like the clumsy Daytime Emily. Her best friend is convinced that Emily’s trying to ditch her for the cool kids and her parents have grounded her for the first time ever.

It all sounds very interesting, but in reality it was dull and unconvincing. Everything about this book was wrong. Emily’s voice was that of a not-too-bright 12-year-old. Her best friend Maggie was downright obnoxious and instead of worrying about the kids that were getting shot, I found myself wishing that someone would shoot her just to shut her up. The pacing was yet another disaster: after being utterly bored and skimming through the last 150 pages, the ending came as a shock and left me completely confused. One minute Emily was at school dealing with one issue and apologizing to her idiot best friend, and the next she was inside the company that changed her and other kids like her, all her fellow deviants were organized, and they were fighting back. And then it all stopped. Huh?

So to make the long story short: the characters were flat, the pacing was all wrong and the romance… *shudders*…. Let’s not even go there.
I think it’s safe to say that I won’t be reading the sequel.