Morgan Rice

I'm very conflicted. I got this book for free, so no harm was done really and I feel bad about giving it such a low score. But if I have to base it on how much I enjoyed it, it has to be one star.
Finishing a book is a really difficult endeavour, so praise where it is due. And I thought the map at the beginning of the book was really pretty.
And it isn't really a positive, but my husband also read it, and we love complaining about it together! We get into passionate debates about how this show more book doesn't work, and it's really fun!
The downsides of this book are numerous, and I don't want to be even more of a bully. I gave it one star, enough said.

After some research: Morgan Rice is a bestselling author and has written over 60 books! Okay, that is an incredible achievement. But it only leaves me more confused. I really don't understand the very good score this book has here on Goodreads, and I'm getting suspicious...
Here are some reviews I found on Amazon:
- "Morgan has managed again to produce a strong set of characters that make us cheer for them on every page....Recommended for the permanent library of all readers that love a well-written fantasy."
--Books and Movie Reviews, Roberto Mattos
- "A great Story!"
- "Adventure, intrigue and good characters"
I'm sorry, but that simply isn't true. I suspect there are a lot of fake reviews out there to hype this book up. But I would hardly call it a book! This "book" has no closure, several characters were introduced, but didn't really have an arc. They were just introduced, as I suspect they will play a role in the future. But that's not how a book works. Not a book from a best selling author anyway.
I will resist the urge the list all the bad that was in this book, but I thought at first it was a self-published book from a new author, a beginner and someone who was probably very young. It reads like something you could read for free on Wattpad, by a student who was kind of winging it in their spare time, and who then decided to publish it.
It is self-published, will is fine, but I really don't understand how this was a bestseller, and the incredible praise I see everywhere. show less

Lol what even was this??

When heart and sword meet, there shall be victory.

I've only ever read [b:Turned|45626634|Turned (The Vampire Journals, #1)|Morgan Rice|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1557304708s/45626634.jpg|15234137] by Morgan Rice before, and it's one of my favorite so-bad-it's-good books, so I went into this expecting the same level of pure garbage that Rice always delivers. And I definitely got that, but I also got a little something more.

This book honestly read like a show more promising but juvenile first draft. There was definitely something there, and I got some feels from certain events and the atmosphere. Ceres was hot headed and ridiculous, and probably the most cliche fantasy heroine ever, but I liked her. Thanos was definitely my favorite character, except he sometimes was a bit of a sexist pig, but it was so poorly done that I wasn't offended. The plot supposedly takes place over the course of like a week, but with every single chapter ending with some grand cliffhanger about how Ceres' life will never be the same, because she's been kidnapped or enslaved or made googly eyes at Thanos for the umpteenth time, it felt like 3 months at least. I couldn't help but sit back and laugh. It seriously felt like Rice made a comprehensive list of every YA fantasy cliche of the last decade and found some way to put every single one of them in this. And that's actually pretty impressive. Good job, I guess!

As a whole, this was a convoluted mess, just the way I like 'em. show less

I found this almost too unbearably bad to continue. Brooke was completely, unbelievably reckless. Especially so, because we are supposed to believe that she kept herself and her sister Bree off the grid and safe for three years. Yet she acts dangerously time and again. Other things that really bothered me about this book… Brooke is seriously injured, including broken ribs, early in her harrowing journey. Yet, she gets up and still performs incredibly feats like climbing fences and jumping show more off buildings. I wanted to believe. But a person who is malnourished and has been in hiding and then in multiple car wrecks and a cage match, just cannot believably jump into the air, catch a rope off a speeding boat and pull herself up.

I gave two stars because the author really knows how to write an action sequence. And while it wasn’t at all believable from a character perspective, I wondered how she would wrap it all up. show less

I did want to enjoy this book. It was marketed as a Hunger Games-esque fight for survival, and I enjoy those sorts of books. However, it failed. Hard.

First off, Brooke has to be one of the dumbest survivors I've ever read about. Her and her sister are starving and there's a clearing just up a hill that they've never bothered to explore. They've been in that house for years and not even during the summer have they explored? Whatever. Not to mention that whole business about not making fires. show more Set up a simple alarm system to warn you if anyone is coming down the road and then make a small fire. It doesn't have to be the size of your house you know.

Honestly, the first third of the book just pissed me off. There were so many things she could have done to make surviving in the mountains so much easier for herself and her sister and yet she didn't. Even finding or making a shelter that wasn't directly in the wind patterns would have been nice.

The writing was also pretty bad. So many times, Brooke talked about how she knew x but did y instead. No. In first person writing, you don't have that fallback. Maybe once or twice. Maybe. Not every other paragraph like this.

A minor thing I hated was the meal she got before heading into the arena. Eating that much rich food that fast, especially if you were as malnourished as Brooke claimed to be,would cause major health problems. And then, the whole last scene on the boat would put all of their metabolisms out of sync (except maybe Logan).

Everything else was okay. Brooke seemed to get over her compunctions about murder pretty quickly, and neither of the two school buses of innocent girls she killed bothered her but whatever. I can tell this is shaping up to be a love triangle which I hate. Ben was essentially useless after he went to find his brother (who I don't think even got a name) so he might as well have died. Plus, no, Brooke did NOT owe him anything for helping her and Bree with food that first winter. It came off as very skeezy. No idea what Logan's motivations are, but he seems to be a typical action dude with a fridged girl in his past. Oh, that reminds me, hello Mrs. Everdeen! I'm not kidding. After her husband is dead/never coming back, she sits in a chair and does nothing, causing the older sister to resent her and take on a parenting role to the younger sister. I guess in that way this book is the Hunger Games, with the plot of Taken shoved into the last few chapters.

Basically, this is a poor imitation riding on the coattails of the Hunger Games. Just read the dang originals - you won't miss anything here. show less