Rating: WARTY!
This is a curious novel wherein the main character, Alexandra, can see emotions/impulses as physical beings which manifest mostly as white men for reasons unknown. This seemed rather racist to me. It's a companion novel to an earlier one set in the same world, but with different characters. I have not read the previous volume.
Alexandra's almost constant companion and pseudo-best friend for many years has been one named Revenge, who has been with her ever since her family was killed by a drunk driver. When Revenge tells her that Nate Foster has been released from jail for good behavior, she takes the gun she knows her uncle keeps hidden, and sets out for Nate's home, but she only spies on him through a window. She doesn't act. She does see a new emotion there, but cannot identify it, and she leaves. Are these things all really emotions? That's how they're described in the novel, but there is quite a variety, most of whom spend very little time with Alexandra. They seem more like fleeting impulses to me!
Anyway, when she returns the next night, Nate isn't home, and his wife is crying in the kitchen. This is when Alexandra meets the new emotion face-to-face and discovers that it's Forgiveness. She also learns that her father could apparently see these characters in the same way that she can. She had never known this before. Her life has been on a downhill spiral, and no one, not her aunt and uncle, not her two best friends in high school, nor anyone else seems to have any clue where her head is at, but now, with this new information, maybe she can turn herself around? Who cares, really? She was an obnoxious, self-obsessed, whiny-ass brat, and I sure didn't.
One thing which made little sense to me was the almost constant companionship which Revenge provided. There is supposedly only one of each emotion (at least from what I saw), and they arrive fleetingly when needed and disappear afterwards, so how come Revenge gets to spend so much time with her? Was he not needed anywhere else in the world? Maybe they have only white revenge in the US, but in Africa there is black revenge, or maybe one for each nation? One for each race? The novel never makes this clear. Maybe it's covered in the first volume. I really don't care that much.
I came across a writing issue here - obscure text. At one point I read, "I refuse to let how much his presence affects me show." It was so curious I had to read it twice more before I fully grasped what it was saying. Wouldn't it have been better to write, "I refuse to let show how much his presence affects me"? One simple change and it improves readability immensely. At least to me it does. This is the value of good editing, which is all on you if you're self-publishing. It's a big burden to carry.
The writing, though, wasn't the real problem, not from a technical PoV. The real problem was the unending tedium of listening to the main character's obsessive-compulsive wallowing, which made me detest her. I ditched this novel as a DNF. I can't recommend it and I'm done with this author.
