The Devil Inside, Jenna Black
well, i decided to jot down thoughts before i completely forget what this one was about. that tends to happen when i'm moving straight on to the sequel, which i'm currently about halfway through.
while the story in itself was interesting, i found the protagonist to be too much of a bitch for me to bear. what attempts at humor i didn't find funny, not in that author trying too hard to amuse way, but in having something called a joke and me going where the hell was the joke in that? "jokes" seem to be random statements of sarcasm, which to me aren't any semblance of a joke, just bitter expression. but, well, that's me.
spoilers galore here now. my main quip with this is that several plot points were NOT resolved very well. for example, i believe at one point adam was suspected of murdering val thanks to morgan, but morgan herself led the cops back to her by owning the cell phone; she missed the cops by a hairline. they must have found the room she rented at least, right? did the cops completely stop investigating val's death? she didn't try to resolve that particular issue, but just dropped it completely after that scene--as if now that it was out of her character's attention, it would be out of the cop's too. it leads me to think that as an author she lives in her character's shoes too much, and doesn't spend time to think about possible repercussions to issues realistically. by the end of this book, nothing bad really happens to any of our characters, besides the issue of torture, which was pretty brief in the pov of the reader, since much of it wasn't shown. the ending parts where brian and her were supposed to be concluding their relationship were skipped over very conveniently also; evident that she's either reached her word count or simply didn't want to write the scene. it left for a very incomplete solution with some missing sense of closure, to me.
all in all, this wasn't a bad book. there were obvious points where she could have improved on the writing and the structure of the story altogether though, but even with that i wouldn't come close to liking her protagonist. there's hardass, which is anita blake, and then there's plain bitch. it was evident that the main character is the one in the wrong in every situation, that i simply couldn't swallow much of her self-pity or explanations to herself about why she was justified in doing whatever action. i couldn't stand someone who tries that hard to keep convincing herself she's in the right in real life, and i can't take a character like that either. the only consolation is that i don't relate to her whatsoever.
but i'm in the middle of the second book, like i said, and the verdict's still out on that one. guess i'll come back to write on that one in a couple of hours.
