S. L. Horne

Imagine you are a talented amateur painter and your mind swirls with imaginative and somewhat bizarre stories about the inner lives of the faceless characters on the drawing. Now, imagine that you are not an ordinary young adult trying to recover from PTSD after all.

Early into the story, Calista is insanely ahem... trusting with strange men she hasn't met before and after a rock concert, she invites a guy to her home and she is unfortunately raped. Now, this scene is crude and these kinds of scenes make many people automatically DNF books, but the scene is the catalyst that spurs Calista to move to another state, change her name to Elara as a means to cope with her haunting experience, and on the side, visit hospitals in order to locate information about her biological parents.

Meanwhile, there is a lake in the town she currently inhabits that seems to be calling her, and she isn't sure if she is going crazy or not...

The first thing that can be a hit or miss with readers is the fact that this book is purposely written in the present tense. Many readers don't mind, others hate it. I am still in the middle ground where as long as the story pulls me in, I won't be too bothered by it.

For better or worse, this is one of those books where very little action happens in the first 50% of the book, whereas the remaining has tons of increasingly weird stuff going on. The side stories of the paintings are the real draw for the beginning of the story that serve as a nice contrast to the dullness of Elara driving her used car around to work a waitress job and other mundane tasks. I suspected the painting scenes to be more than a figment of Elara's imagination, but I don't wish to spoil in what sense.

I think the story really picked up when we meet sweet Denton. I really do not wish to spoil much about him because it would ruin the weirdness ensued from the second half of the novella. I do however wish to point that there are some things about him that I felt to be plot holes. Sadly I can't say much about why I say that here due to spoilers.

The book had a lot of really good points, but the really slow start made it hard for me to connect to Elara (I never really got to like her much at all during the course of the story). I think the huge amount of plot holes and lack of explanation about the other world Denton is a part of, plus the "Time Travel Paradox" issues that the book triggers are things that made me hyper aware during the story. I do sincerely think the story has a lot of good pluses, despite its flaws and will likely end up reading any sequels sometime when they come out.… (mehr)