Review: Abandon

Title: Abandon
Author: Meg Cabot
Genre: YA, fantasy, retellings

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

So...I'm abandoning Abandon (oh the irony!). I sat through about 100 pages, hoping things would get better, but they didn't. Sorry Pierce - frankly, you could just die and I wouldn't care. Oh wait, you already did...

I haven't read any Meg Cabot books, but I have heard many good things about them, especially about their smart and spirited main characters. Pierce is no such character. She's spoiled, vapid, filthy rich, and has the "traumatic experience that alienates her from the rest of the world and thus makes her super special." I usually like sarcastic characters, because I'm pretty sarcastic myself (can you tell?). Pierce just grated on my nerves with her constant allusions to how beautiful she is and how special she is and how she can get her dear old daddy to pay for anything by guilt-tripping him about how it's entirely his fault she drowned in a pool and died for an hour. This last point especially annoyed me, since not only was Pierce expecting to have her every whim paid for by dear old daddy, she was taking advantage of him (and her mom) in order to do so.

I was hoping Pierce would snap out of it and get some sense knocked into her, but as I read, things just got worse. Apparently she got herself into all sorts of messes, was saved by an overprotective, mysterious, and apparently very attractive guy (the same guy who she abandoned in the underworld, and who has every right to want to rip her head off instead of saving her pretty little face multiple times). After being rescued by said guy (who goes by the name of John. What kind of mysterious guy from the underworld is named John? I felt like the author was trying too hard to be ironic here.), Pierce promptly proceeds to lash out at him. I know Pierce wasn't exactly taken to John's corner of the underworld by informed consent, but she escaped, didn't she? What right does she have to keep on bashing on the poor guy?

Yes, Pierce aggravated me beyond words. None of the other characters were particularly interesting enough for me to put up with her and continue the story. The story itself had a lot of potential - a reimagining of the Persephone myth? That could have been very cool and very insightful - but I didn't have the patience to see if it ever met that potential. Judging by the way things were going and other goodreads users' reviews, I don't think I'm missing much.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think Cabot is a terrible writer, and this book won't stop me from trying some of her other books. There are very few books that I don't have the patience to finish, and I was really looking forward to this story, so I'm incredibly disappointed that this had to be one of the unfinished few.