32 of 52 in my 2011 book blogging challenge.
Graveminder is an absolute waste of time, but an absorbing one. I’m embarrassed to say I stayed up way too late Sunday night finishing this book. It had me hooked. It should have, but it did. It’s only just been released, and I imagine it will be a big hit.
The Good Points
1. The concept is original. This is a zombie story in which a whole town has made a deal with death itself in order to keep the dead wholly dead. As these deals go, despite the fact that the town made the agreement, only two people can see it fulfilled. The survival of their community and thus the world at large rests on them. This makes for high drama of the page-turning variety. It will hold your attention.
2. Some of the characters are well done. Death is quite charming as he must be if he hopes to lure people to him. I also liked the older characters, the ones handing off their duties to a new generation. They had small parts, but they were quite well done.
3. The world of the dead as depicted in this book is intriguing. It makes me hope she writes more books in this setting so that I can find out more about what happens there.
The Bad Points
1. The writing style is not great. A not great writing style didn’t stop Stephenie Meyer from getting super rich off her storytelling, though, so I don’t see it holding Melissa Marr back either.
2. There’s a huge emphasis on the romance between the male and female lead characters with no actual development of that romance. We have a bunch of smarmy declarations of feelings, but we don’t see those feeling develop as part of the story. We actually get the opposite. I actually found myself hoping Byron would just go find someone else because Rebekkah was not relationship material. I don’t think I was supposed to feel that way since Rebekkah is the primary character and the one I’m supposed to identify with the most. I did, though. This was a love story in which the love was just not there.
3. I found the frequent shifts in point of view annoying. Leave something as a mystery, please. We shouldn’t know what every person in the story is thinking. We should have to figure that out along with the viewpoint characters. When everyone gets a turn at being the viewpoint character, it robs us of that chance.
I could go on and on about what I didn’t like. A good fiction writing teacher would rip this thing apart in every direction. Still, the fact remains that I stayed up late trying to finish it. I’ve read plenty of perfectly executed books that did not hold my attention. For whatever else, Melissa Marr is lacking in her writing, she does have that magic ingredient — whatever it may be — that makes people want to keep reading. Lucky her.
