Conjured by Sarah Beth Durst

Title: Conjured

Author: Sarah Beth Durst

Book #: Standalone


Publisher: Walker Childrens

Publish Date: September 3rd 2013

Pages: 368

Format: Kindle Edition


Date Read: September 2nd 2013

Rating: ★½ / out of 5

If my insides were a bookshelf, she thought, I'd be a jumble of volumes, stacked in random order and filled with blank pages.

Summary:

Eve has a new home, a new face, and a new name—but no memories of her past. She’s been told that she's in a witness protection program. That she escaped a dangerous magic-wielding serial killer who still hunts her. The only thing she knows for sure is that there is something horrifying in her memories the people hiding her want to access—and there is nothing they won’t say—or do—to her to get her to remember.

Eve must find out who and what she really is before the killer finds her—but the truth may be more dangerous than anyone could have ever imagined.
(Synopsis taken from Goodreads)

Review: I received a free copy of this book for review.

This book had a very interesting premise, but, unfortunately, nothing made sense until literally the last 5% of the book. I'm sorry but that shit I don't like.

__________

The Characters:

Eve was not the kind of character I like reading about. Granted, she has a lot of.. blanks in her memory. However, in my opinion, she was a push-over, naive and completely lacked a substantial personality. 

"You aren't old enough for coffee."
Eve nodded. She didn't bother to question the statement, not without Malcolm here.

While I liked her relationship with Malcolm, I thought her dependence on him was a way too "damsel-in-distress" like and I got tired of it quickly. Especially when situations like this happened. Eve also had this way of sounding like an incompetent 2-year old:

"Out," Eve said.
"Five?" Aunt Nicki asked. "But that's-"
"Shh," Malcolm said.
"Out, Eve repeated.

Her memory loss episodes were the worst, though. Not only did they not make any sense because we have no idea what is going on for the entire book, when she wakes up out of them, so much time passes. As they happen pretty much all the time, we never really get a good moment to get a good grasp of who Eve is.

I wasn't too found of any of the side characters, either. 

The love interest, Zack, was a smart-aleck know it all who was so annoying. I literally did not see the appeal. At all. He is filled with completely useless facts that he has this urge to constantly share with Eve:

"Little-known facts about apples: apples are member of the rose family, it takes energy from fifty leaves to produce one fruit, and humans have been eating apples since at least sixty-five hundred BC. Bet you're asking yourself how a handsome guy like me who can't seem to stop talking ended up working in a library where the talking thing is not so condoned."

Actually.. Yes. That's exactly what I was wondering. Oh, and this is what he says to her when he first meets her:

"Glad you didn't freak when I said I wanted to kiss you. I'll wait for an invitation, of course, but I believe in being up front about these kinds of things. Prevents misunderstandings later. I don't want you thinking that we can ever be just friends. Unless it's friends with benefits."

Malcolm, her "protector", was almost pretty cool. I liked how he wasn't your typical white-guy-badass-government-agent. However, he did the one thing I cannot stand: Answering. Questions. With. Questions.

"Is she from my world?"
"You tell me," Malcolm said.
"If I knew, I wouldn't ask."

Points for Eve!

And Aunt Nicki.. well. She was just a bitch. I have to admit, though, she had a killer sense of humor:

"Oh, it's you," Aunt Nicki said. "I was hoping for something more interesting. Like a delivery of soap."

The Story:

Like I stated earlier, we pretty much have no idea what is going on until the last 5% of this book. At that point, though, when we finally learn the truth about the situation, it actually picks up. It was a pain for me to read through the first 95%, but a breeze through the last 5%? Yeah.. The ending not only gave us all the information we were looking for, but also wrapped the story up decently. 

Overall, as a whole, only the very last part of this book was enjoyable. I wouldn't fully recommend it, but I wouldn't stop you from giving it a try if you think you might like it still.

Quote:

But she thought of the girl in the tower with a world laid out before her that she could not touch. "I want to be here."


On My Goodreads:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/694130469