Beacon by Angela Brown

Synopsis:
***When ignorance is bliss, Bliss is power.***

Tsunamis reduced the USA into a shell of itself, called The Fold. Surviving humans and vampires joined forces to form The Colony, where registered citizens do as they’re told.

They donate blood quarterly and dream of being chosen as Attendees for the Jubilee celebrations, that is, everyone except Macie Breen. With high school graduation near, she’s anxious to ditch the rules in hopes of starting a new life with Thane, an unregistered and also her best friend.

Her hopes fizzle when Macie is selected as an Attendee, forever registered. Any future with Thane…impossible. Being chosen comes with another unexpected price.

Truths about The Colony blaze into ashes and lies when she discovers the vampires haven’t kept their part of the bargain. Worst still, Macie’s life unravels as her stint in the city of Bliss forces her to face daunting truths about who, and what, she really is.

    

My Review:
2.5 stars — I probably should have DNF’d this one.  I could tell fairly early on that it probably wasn’t my kind of book, but I’d won it in a contest so I kind of felt like I should give it a better chance.  (Also, it’s Black History Month, and this was the one book in my TBR that appeared to have a POC in it, so I was striving for diversity)  But it just never got better for me.

The writing starts out very descriptive…I’m not a literary kind of girl, but it felt like taking the whole “show, don’t tell” thing to another level.  It just didn’t flow naturally for me.  Might be a personal taste thing.  If you’re like me, you would totally notice it in the first few pages, so you could always sample it and see…  Strangely enough that sort of petered out as the story went on, so it was really only predominant in the first third of the book.  What’s really strange is that for all of the description that was given, I had a hard time picturing things — like the devil spawn…it didn’t really incite fear in me.  It more made me think of a Star Trek The Original Series creature.  Maybe it was the furriness?  Maybe it was just me….

I never became all that attached to the characters…there just wasn’t enough connection for me.  Some really horrible/terrifying things happen in this book, and quite honestly I NEVER felt enough emotion from our heroine, Macie.  Seriously.  People die.  She’s forced to *kill* people.  She learns all sorts of lies and about all sorts of new creatures (including things about herself).  And through it all she just sort of dealt with it.  Not that she had *no* reaction, it just felt like a blip and then it was over and it was on to the next crisis.

The pacing also felt weird to me.  There was a LOT that happens, but it was never a big buildup, mostly just these little hills and then we would move on to the next hill and the next.  Even the climax didn’t feel all that big to me, just felt like yet another hill.  I guess I was just never really that engaged with what was going on.

I didn’t really feel a lot of chemistry with Thane  either.  I almost felt more for Rig, and that went in a completely different direction than I was expecting.

It’s funny, b/c it almost felt like there was too much going on that it was hard to keep track of, but at the same time I felt kind of bored.  *sigh*  I don’t know.  🙁  I hate writing reviews for books I don’t enjoy.