Rating: WARTY!
I gave up on this ebook right around the fifty percent mark. It had started out pretty decently and in spite the first person voice which I typically detest, I was getting along with it and growing interested in the main character, but the more she felt her psychic powers coming in, the more stupid she got it seemed, and if there's one thing I can't stand to read, it's a YA novel where the female author seems absolutely determined to make her main female character as dumb as a brick. I quit right after an incident I shall describe below. I can't commend this based on the half of it that I read.
The basis of the story is that young Crystal has a psychic mom, who of course in the tradition of YA novels like this, has never told her daughter a thing about her powers and her daughter wasn't smart enough to notice. Of course her daughter is the most powerful psychic in several generations, and when her period starts, she starts, first by seeing the ghost of a dead classmate, who died in a house fire the year before, and things escalate from there to the point where the daughter magically seems to be able to do anything.
I'm not a fan of the road most traveled, so I started losing faith in this author when this business of her powers arriving at puberty was introduced. I was even willing to let that slide if the story was good, but it got worse. She 'connected' with a crystal ball (her name's Crystal, get it?!) at her mother's new age shop. The ball wasn't even crystal, it was glass, and I began to wonder why the author hadn't simply named her character Crystal Ball. When she tried to use this glass orb, she had to light candles first. So there was nothing new or different here, the author taking the path of least resistance, otherwise known as Lazy Avenue South.
In the ball, Crystal saw a dark figure kidnap a young girl from her bed. Of course, it being the way of things having to be so vague as to be useless in these stories, there was zero information about who this was or when it had happened. Instead of being fascinated with her powers working so well, and trying to learn all she could about what was going on, Crystal freaked out and threw the ball on the floor, and it didn't break!
The very next morning, she's toasting a bagel and turns on the TV supposedly for the weather (apparently Crystal doesn't have a cell phone - maybe she uses a crystal radio...), she catches an item on the news about a young girl being abducted from her home and is too stupid to put two and two together. She just blindly turns off the TV and leaves for school.
Crystal has a best friend named Emma and despite this purported BF status, they neither of them seem to tell the other a damned thing, which serves only to betray the author's claim of their supposed closeness. I was willing to let that go until it got really bad. Here's one incident, as an exemplar of how bad it was. Crystal is in the restroom with Emma, who doesn't know she's psychic since her powers have only just come in.
Crystal is obsessed with people accusing her of being a witch if this gets out and her being shunned at school which is why she's told no-one. Why in this day and age would anyone accuse a psychic of being a witch? Far too many idiots actually believe in psychics - they pay good money to have their fortune told and so on. Why would there be a witch hunt? None of this made any sense to me, especially in light of the fact that the very reason her mother had settled there to begin with was the prevalence of people who live there and who have psychic abilities.
Anyway, Crystal finally decides to come clean with Emma, so they go into the bathroom and check the stalls, which are empty, and Crystal reveals her secret. Then Emma leaves and Crystal uses the stall. Finally she comes out and starts washing her hands, and another stall opens and this other girl is there who has apparently been there all the time and heard everything!
Excuse me? Didn't the author just say they checked the stalls to insure privacy? So how did they miss her? Does she have the power to make herself invisible? Frankly, I think the author just lost track of what she'd written, or simply didn't think it through properly.
I mean if all they'd done was to glance idly under the doors and left it at that, and the character who eavesdropped had been established as someone who sneaks into bathrooms to spy on people, then yes, maybe, but the author established none of that. She didn't say they looked under doors, she wrote that they checked each stall! This was really bad writing. The author isn't a bad writer per se, but some of her plotting was awful, and to use the old 'I heard it through the bathroom vine' trope is sadly unoriginal and lacking in imagination.
This other girl hiding in the stall threatens Crystal that if she doesn't help her, she'll tell everyone about her psychic powers, and expose her, and Crystal immediately caves-in, fearing being branded a witch! LOL! In reality she could just have claimed that everything this girl is saying is bullshit and got Emma to back her up. It turns out his other girl thinks her best friend Kelli is being abused by her boyfriend Nate, and she wants Crystal's help to prove it. If that's the case, then why not just say that to Crystal right from the start and ask her for help instead of threatening her? Again it made no sense! There was no feeling of female camaraderie here at all.
Crystal seems really reticent about telling Emma anything, and vice versa. This made no sense given they're supposedly best friends, but Crystal outright lies to Emma about why she has to sneak off after school. She has to sneak off to meet this girl who apparently couldn't tell her a thing about what she wanted in an empty bathroom, and insisted they meet later! This made zero sense either. Even when Crystal knows this is a good and useful thing to help with, she still lies to Emma about it. Why? It made zero sense.
Having seen Crystal talking to his girlfriend, this guy Nate threatens Crystal, pinning her against the locker and holding her by her throat, and all Crystal does is cower down wondering how she will ever get proof that he's abusing his girlfriend, instead of thinking, "He just abused me! I'm going to report him to the principal!" And why would Nate even care about one single short exchange he'd witnessed from a distance, between Crystal and his girlfriend? Not one thing in this whole series of events made any sense at all. It was really poorly plotted.
So characters who'd started out quite engagingly, were suddenly stupid and cardboard-thin and it really made the story go downhill. It's not that the whole novel is badly-written; some of it is quite well put-together, but it just didn't feel realistic any more when all this stuff began to go down. It felt like poor-quality fanfic. It was poorly designed, and completely unacceptable as a viable story. I can't commend it.
