DNF Review: The Lost Boys

The Lost Boys
Author: Lilian Carmine

Publication Date:  January 1 2014
~A copy was provided by Ebury Press via Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review~

 

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Fate has brought them together. But will it also keep them apart?

Having moved to a strange town, sixteen-year-old Joey Gray is feeling a little lost, until she meets a cute, mysterious boy near her new home.

But Tristan Halloway is not what he seems. And there's a very good reason why he's always to be found roaming between the gravestones in the local cemetery...
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I knew from the first page I was not going to ask me. You know when you get a sense of a book from the very first paragraph? This was it, but I kept to it, hoping it would change, because though the writing sounds juvenile and the characters awkward and forced, it wasn't that bad to struggle through.

Until...

All! The! Punctuation! And yes, I use punctuation a lot, but not when I'm writing, and certainly not in a book.

It made you feel constantly on edge, that the characters were schizophrenic, it was seriously jarring that stopped you from getting into it, and made the writing not only not flow, but all over the place.

It stopped and started, made everything sound strained and rehearsed when interacting.
Punctuation is to be used sparingly, to show something, emotion, to create an atmosphere, and not to be used three times in one sentence, with every character speaking.

There's also the inconsistency, if you read the blurb, it says she's sixteen, but in the book she's 17, not a major big thing, but, you know.

Then there's the characters, whom are really, really unrealistic for the ages they are supposed to be, everything came off like a cheesy soap opera. Let's start with Joey, our hypocritical narrator that is a) annoying, b) boring and c) hypocritical. Did I mention that already? She's put in impossible situations when she goes to the boarding school. The administration "made a mistake" and she's sharing a dorm in the boys' wing.  Really? And then, once it's made clear Joey's a girl and not a boy, her new "friend"-who she hated two minutes before- get's the school to keep her living in that room, just because she "owns" the school because she's super rich and everybody complies to her ideas and what she wants. Yeah, really. Like that's going to happen. Then there's her mother who does not act like a mother at all, seriously, she was just okay with her now eighteen year old, sleeping and living with two teenage boys. Oh-kay.

I won't even go into the "ghost" side of things, and the incredibly coincidental explanation, oh my.

Know what really annoyed the hell out of me? The line that supposedly everybody says after people find out Joey's name. "But...that's a boy's name!" Are you kidding me? Everytime. I just, can't even. A) No one gives a fuck, B) it's completely stupid that most of some chapters evolved around her name.

I-no.

And it's compared to Twilight...if you have nothing to say, keep your mouth shut, right?