Review: Envy

Envy by Gregg Olson

Publisher: Splinter
Published: August 23rd 2011
Pages: 285
Source: ARCycling Program
Genre: Mystery, Paranormal
Goodreads

Crime lives--and dies--in the deceptively picture-perfect town of Port Gamble (aka “Empty Coffin”), Washington. Evil lurks and strange things happen--and 15-year-olds Hayley and Taylor Ryan secretly use their wits and their telepathic “twin-sense” to uncover the truth about the town's victims and culprits.

Envy, the series debut, involves the mysterious death of the twins' old friend, Katelyn. Was it murder? Suicide? An accident? Hayley and Taylor are determined to find out--and as they investigate, they stumble upon a dark truth that is far more disturbing than they ever could have imagined.

I think quite a while back something had caught my eye about this book that had made me want to read it, so I couldn't pass up a chance when I saw it was up for grabs on ARCycling. From the very beginning I quickly realized that this was not the book for me, despite the excitement I had had before.

This book is just overall very confusing. There are so many things and characters and just STUFF, that I almost never was 100% sure what was going on at any given time. Many times when a new chapter or scene was started I barely understood which character was being talked about until the middle of that section, and it just got really redundant after a while.

There are so many characters in this book. The characters that are followed the most are twins Hayley and Taylor. Between these two main characters I could almost never find anyway to tell them apart personality, appearance, or otherwise. In the book they really just seemed like one person in two different bodies  because I could never tell which was which. Other characters described were a little easier to tell apart, but many times I had no idea why their story would be relevant, nor was I interested.

During the first half of the book it felt like the time in which scenes take place jumped all over the place. Though I'm not sure if this is in fact true, it seemed to me like one second it would be the day after the girl, Kate died, and in others it would be only a few hours. I have no idea.

Finally, there was some physic/medium strangeness in this book. When it arose the first time I was so confused, and then it just kept popping up. I think that the same outcome could have been found if that stuff had not been there, and it really just makes the story seem less serious.

Overall I really did not like this book and I often found myself wanting to put it down. It took a lot for me to finish this book.