Hey, guys! Do you want a book full of action! Adventure! Mystery! Mythology! Stuff happening! Excitement! Battles! Yes? Sound awesome? OMG and this book opens with a tense battle in a gymnasium with mysterious monsters and a naked guy that fell out of nowhere? SO COOL!Oh, wait, it was all a trick.Yes, that’s right, if you read this book and love the first three chapters, you might as well put it down after that and call it a short story. After that first blush of action, the book then proceeds to crank up the “let’s ignore everything”-o-meter. A brilliant opening led into a disappointment of a book, because there is nothing that will piss me off faster than a cast of characters who collectively say “enough of that shit, let’s talk about school and boys instead.”Books and authors everywhere, you seem to have missed the memo: I WANT TO READ ABOUT THIS STUFF, NOT ABOUT PEOPLE IGNORING THIS STUFF! Why write a book about mythical monsters attacking people if five seconds later everyone decides to pretend like it didn’t happen?Most of the book deals with Fenn angsting and Mason making eyes at him. There are some tepid attempts at a mystery, since Fenn doesn’t have his memories, but the investigative skills in this book boil down to “let’s mope around and hope the answer presents itself eventually.” There are quite a few avenues they could have taken to actively seek knowledge, several characters who show up and clearly know something, and none of these opportunities are ever followed up on. Then the characters sit around going “wah, I don’t have any clues” and I want to bash them over the head screaming THAT WOMAN AT THE HOTEL CLEARLY KNEW YOU, WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU HAVE NO CLUES?This book had a lot of potential, it really did. But all that potential got squandered as the book decided to wallow around in angst and purposefully hide information from everyone, characters and readers included. A lot of the concepts in this book were really interesting and I wanted to know more, which made it that much more infuriating that I didn’t get to find anything out. In the book’s favor, it was pretty decently written. It had a very teenager voice, but without going over the top about it. There were a few points where words were just used wrong, but they were more accidently funny than outright bad. And I did like most of the characters, they all managed to neatly toe that line of being not-quite-a-stereotype, all fitting into a typical highschool role but without being flat or cartoons. I wish we’d gotten to see more of them, instead of sitting around with Mason and Fenn, ignoring plot points.
