Book Review : Torn by Erica O’Rourke
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I was really torn on how to rate this book. I was totally intrigued by the premise and the opening chapter or 2 (that I had in the sample). But then the first 10 ish chapters seemed to be the same thing over and over. And over and over. And over … you get the point. Maybe not that many, but that’s how it seemed. All Mo was doing was fretting over Verity. I get that she was sad, but it kept the pace incredibly slow for me and I’m the kind of reader that …if it’s slow, the story still has to progress.
That made keeping up with it hard. Because I kinda wanted to know more about Luc and Colin, but I was worried I’d read yet another chapter that didn’t make the story go anywhere.
I also wasn’t really into the Luc/Colin/Mo relationship stuff that was underpining the ultimate plot of the story. It’s like it was there, then it wasn’t there. It was there then it wasn’t. Kinda like the opener. Back and forth. It wasn’t so much a love triangle because we were always seeing it from Mo’s perspective.
I also found her insistence that SHE find the killers and get her justice a bit out there for a good girl. I was the epitome of the good girl when I was young. The epitome of it. If my parents had said ‘no’, I did not. Or only went up to the grey line, but didn’t cross it. So Mo was setup as the BEST of the BEST of the good girls and she just goes off to find the answers on her own? I had a hard time buying into that. It seemed forced.
I really did like Mo because I saw a lot of myself in her. I liked Luc and Colin too, but again, from my past experience, love triangles very rarely exist. So, how she can go all through high school and then have these two non-teenagers get so close just also seemed improbable.
Then again, magic isn’t ‘real’ per se, so maybe in a magic world, anything goes. But it started in reality, so I would really think the human element should have stayed human.
Maybe I’m being too critical, but these issues bugged me enough that it took me MONTHS to finish and in the end, I started skimming just to make the pace pick up.