Title: Pulse
Author: HJ Daly
My Rating: 2.5 Stars
Good Reads Rating: 4.03 Stars
Content Rating: 16+ (some disturbing images, violence)
Series: Sword of Idis #1
Genre: YA Fantasy/Post-Apocalyptic
Pages: 310
Publisher: Anchor Group Publishing
Check it Out: Good Reads | Barnes and Noble | Amazon
I received a copy of this book from the author in exchange for an honest review.
Good Reads Synopsis:
She looked into their non-existent faces and felt them smile in anticipation.
The light is fading fast and Esa must find shelter before the deviants come crawling out of the woodwork. From the moment she steps into the darkened room her life takes a terrifying turn and she is pulled away from her post apocalyptic world.
With a horde of goblins close on her heels, she enters a magical realm in search of answers. Why can she sense magic and why is a powerful sorcerer determined to end her life?
I really wanted to like this book more. Every time I picked it up, I was determined to like it more than I had the previous time I’d read. I’d seen some really favorable reviews on it, so I thought that maybe I just wasn’t getting something. Maybe I just needed to keep reading.
I would be dishonest if I said there wasn’t anything I liked about this book. The central story itself is quite good. There were moments that I enjoyed. The execution was what bothered me.
There was a lot of weird grammar stuff going on. I’m all about stylistic writing for whatever your book needs…like, some of the stuff I write in 1st person is stream of consciousness so certain fragments and things like that for stylistic purposes work great. In Pulse there were lots of odd run-on sentences…as if someone had just forgotten to add a period or a semi-colon. This made it very hard to read. I don’t think run-ons are ever ok…maybe you disagree, but they got really annoying.
Grammar issues aside, I felt very disconnected from the characters. I don’t even know how to describe why, but I felt that I didn’t really know them at all. They all felt really shallow to me, as if they were 2D cardboard cut outs of people…
The romance was weird. At first, I was expecting Esa and Rootu, this magic ‘spinner’ (still not sure exactly what a spinner is…did I just miss it when he was first introduced?) to get together, which totally would have been weird, because he was so childlike (and then you find out he was like, 40-something???). But her relationship with Thomas was kind of weird as well because he just popped in out of nowhere and then there was all this forced tension between them that got EXHAUSTING. It was like, I TRUST NO ONE, but I kind of like him, BUT I TRUST NO ONE, but maybe Thomas is ok BUT I TRUST NO ONE. It just was too much of the same tension over and over again. They had their moments, but they were few and far between.
There was a lot of superfluous stuff going on throughout the whole book. There were literally entire chapters where nothing happened to move the plot along. Cut it, I say. It cluttered what was actually a rather nice plot, you just had to dig for it. Also, raise the stakes. Some of the explanations for things were very weak. There was also a lot of telling, rather than showing in this book. As in, the narrator would say something like ‘she asked him questions about magic and he explained as much as he could to her’ and that was ALL we got. We didn’t hear any of the explanations that he gave her.
I feel bad that this is so negative. But there were a lot of issues with the writing that kept me from enjoying the story. I think I had really high expectations because I was like OOH Fantasy and Post-Apocalyptic, this has got to be good!
