The Wanderers by Jessica Miller
Series: The Wanderers #1
My Rating: 3 Stars
Good Reads Rating: 3.96 Stars
Content Rating: 16+ (some language, sexual situations)
Check it out: Good Reads | Amazon | Barnes and Noble
Good Reads Summary:
What do you do when you learn your family is the one who’s holding all the secrets? Secrets that could get you killed…
Ella is looking forward to starting college in the fall with her best friend Josie. She’s looking for a place where she can get away from her overbearing parents and two older annoying brothers. Unfortunately Ella realizes that sometimes the past comes back to haunt you.
Ella soon learns that the man who terrorizes her dreams is in fact real and coming after her.
When one of her classmates is murdered, Ella slowly recognizes this is not some strange coincidence. Ella fears that the boy she’s falling in love with is the one who stalks her dreams and no longer knows who she can trust.
When she finally learns the truth of her family’s deepest secret, Ella has to face her demons by taking out one of the people she thought she could trust…before they kill her.
This is a decent YA Paranormal Romance, if you’re looking for something to fill Twilight’s shoes.
The beginning felt really slow to me however; we didn’t really kick it in to paranormal gear until about 65% of the way through. The beginning feels like YA/NA contemporary: girl goes off to college…sorority shenanigans…hot guy takes interest for no obvious reason…crazy slutty best friend…not much else happened for the first half of the book. If I had been expecting a contemporary chick-lit book, that would have been alright, but I was a wee bit disappointed, since I was expecting this:
I mean, Miller threw us a few bones with the many “Someone is watching me” scenes, creepy memories and possible hallucinations of glowing eyes, etc. But most of it was the main character, Ella, being like “I had such a scary dream”. So not much went on in the supernatural department. I remember checking and re-checking the genres on good reads, just be to sure I knew what kind of book it was.
And then you get half way through the book and it’s like an avalanche.
All of this information is dumped on you, and I can’t help feeling like the next book would be far more enjoyable since you have all the ground work now, and a much clearer sense of where Miller is going with the story. The plot was fairly predictable, but enjoyable nonetheless, once we got into paranormal town.
Ella was one of those YA heroines that isn’t the most annoying character you could imagine, but she does a lot of stupid things. She makes a ton of stupid decisions, especially in the second half of the book. Tristan, Mr. Romance, was super undefined to me. Miller has him sleeping with girls right and left and then he’s like, following Ella around, and then five minutes after working his butt off wooing Ella, he’s sleeping with another girl. I still don’t know how Miller wants us to feel about him. I liked him well enough, but I didn’t believe his devotion to Ella, even when things got serious.
Josie, Ella’s best friend was actually pretty annoying. Aside from throwing herself at guys, she kept pushing Ella to do things she wasn’t really comfortable with. I understand wanting your friend to live a little, but chill out. You should know what kind of things your best friend is or isn’t comfortable with. And if she says NO to something, stop asking. Their friendship seemed a little incongruous.
There were some grammar issues that got kind of annoying, like using the wrong tense of a verb. I think having another editorial sweep through The Wanderers would be helpful. I found these issues kind of weird, because otherwise the writing is solid; Miller writes in a confident, comfortable voice.
Similar books: Twilight by Stephanie Meyer, Evernight by Claudia Gray
