Warning to all ye who love to vote on Amazon reviews, this is going to be the lamest one I've ever written here because I could not finish the book. I received my copy via Amazon Vine, therefore I'm obligated to do a review, which I have no problem with. I haven't been having very good luck with Vine books, though, and this time despite loving Fantaskey's debut novel, Jessica's Guide to Dating on the Dark Side, I was again left feeling listless and bored.
Jekel Loves Hyde has a great premise, being based off the classic the title emulates. I was sold. I love the concept of the original and have enjoyed movies based on it, and I sincerely dug the twist the author uses here. That's really the only expectation I had coming in, that the book might try to emulate that eerie, unrelenting sense of morbid danger the original has. And it does. Jekel Loves Hyde has a great atmosphere, but it soon became apparent to me that a great atmosphere was all it would offer this particular reader. Enough to keep me interested anyway.
I'm a character-driven reader for the most part. I love good worldbuilding, where it feels so effortless, like a cradle for the rest of the book. Once that's firmly established in the back of my mind I want to know the characters. I couldn't get into the ones here. The chapters (most of which are ridiculously short, sometimes not even two full pages hardly) alternate between Jill and Tristan's first point of view tellings. And that's the problem, I think, for me. Each tells the story. There isn't very much showing. Telling gets monotonous and after several chapters (I'm sorry, I forget what page number I stopped at), I just couldn't take it anymore. Also, when we're only ever told how a character feels, it doesn't make for very imaginative or thrilling character development.
Another thing that irked me was the intense foreshadowing - an element that I've seen in other things based on the original. Maybe this just didn't work well in fiction format for me, but in Jekel Loves Hyde, the constant foreshadowing, at the end of almost every chapter, became redundant. When the next chapter turned up yet another point of foreshadowing, I realized I was gritting my teeth a little.
The writing also wasn't up to par with the author's debut work. I'm not sure if this YA novel is targeted at a younger YA set, maybe? But I felt the writing didn't lend itself particularly well to intelligent young readers. I think that goes back to the telling aspect, which you don't need that much of. Give the readers credit, that they will "get" it when the writing shows instead of tells. I felt like I was reading a completely different author.
This was one of my most anticipated books for 2010, and I'm more sorry than I can say to be disappointed to the point of not finishing. As there's plenty more I need to read, the question came down to being miserable reading or taking a chance on the next book in my TBR. You know the answer. Two stars for the fact that I couldn't finish (which I blame myself for in spite of not enjoying), and the concept and atmosphere, which I felt was the only good thing about what I did read.
