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BECOMING

Spare Me

Editor: Sonja Nitschke
August 15, 2008

I’ve only read the first volume of Arielle Harris’s so called trilogy and I won’t be reading the second one any time soon. 

Why?  Because it reads as a bad Stephenie Meyer fan fiction.

Our protagonist is the typical Mary Sue Unique Snowflake, devoid of any real personality.

We have the handsome fellow with the compelling eyes and creepy stalker tendencies which is ok because he, you know, loves her and wants to be with her for like, ever.

Their relationship, however, is doomed from the start and echoes crudely of Romeo and Juliet. 

"Becoming" attempts to be a tragedy, but ultimately fails.  There is hurt and pain and tears and misfortune, but it’s hard to have intense emotions when all the characters are one dimensional sketches who simply exist to propel the "plot" forward.  Throughout the narrative, I didn’t feel sympathy for the various characters, nor did I fear for them. 

Mostly this has to do with the simplistic way they are written.  The author tells us their emotions, she does not show them to us.  This tends to imply that the narrator is also omniscient, since she seems to know just what the people around her are feeling or thinking. 

If you’re a fan of the Twilight books, you’ll probably enjoy this.  Not rating it one star because the writing, though artistically bad, was not unreadable.

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