I’ll probably post better pictures whenever I manage to figure out how to shoot them in the two feet of space between my desk and my bookshelf. For now it’s just this.
"Sometimes a moment defines you, defines how people see you for the rest of your life. You can accept it or fight it. If you're lucky, you'll recognize the moment when it happens."
"Maybe if we both wish hard enough, I will become invisible, with watery veins and glass bones. My translucent heart will beat on but my father will not notice me. He sees only my mother in the spaces around him.”
It’s been a while since I reviewed Pushed (2014), the last book in this series. So to recap: so far, this series has been okay, but not particularly noteworthy. The world Jackson built was never very interesting to me, and I was beginning to lose interest in the characters as well. The plotting was alright, and Jackson’s prose was pretty good, but I was looking for something more from this series. I was hoping the character arcs would begin to advance more, and that Jackson could flesh out the world to make it more worldbuilding, while writing a satisfying plot to end the series. So does this book live up to any of that? I know that Jackson is a skilled author, from reading If I Lie (2012) - can she write another book that interesting?
Short answer: No. Not even close.
This was easily the worst book in the trilogy, and it was a huge chore to get through. I’ve never been a huge fan of this series, but I always thought that Jackson was a talented enough author that maybe the finale could take it in a better direction. As it turns out... nope. I had already known it, but this book definitively proves to me that Jackson is not suited to writing fantasy, and that she needs to write another contemporary book before I ever like one of her books again. But I don’t even need to compare this to If I Lie to explain why this fails, because it fails on its own terms in so many ways. I’ll be honest: as I read this book, I genuinely forgot that I ever liked a book by Jackson. This series was always a big departure for her, but this book has so little to do with what made me think she has potential as an author that I had trouble remembering that Jackson has written anything good before.
Here’s the big, fundamental problem with Jackson as a fantasy writer: she doesn’t know how to infuse story with character development. For all my complaints about this novel, Jackson does lay the foundations for a decent finale in the early pages. She establishes high stakes, she gives the characters an emotional investment in the outcome, and she gives them a clear goal to work towards. For a few chapters, I even felt a sense of tension.
And then, around 40% of the way through the novel, the pacing comes to a sudden halt, and everything Jackson built up is totally destroyed. The problem is that she needs to write character-oriented scenes - mostly, a romance between Remi and Gabe - and she doesn’t know how to incorporate them into the actual story. So she completely destroys the tension by writing a mostly light-hearted romance between Remi and Gabe, in the middle of what’s supposed to be the intense finale. It’s as if Jackson doesn’t know whether she wanted to write something fast-paced and tense, or something slow and introspective, so she awkwardly tries to cram them together, and she fails at both in the process.
I’ll get to why the romance fails later, but for now, let’s talk about the plot. For most of the middle act of the book, things barely progress toward the climax at all - at the 80% mark, we’re at almost the exact same place we were at the 40% mark. The only real events that happen seem to move the plot sideways, rather than forward. Jackson introduces a bunch of new characters that don’t contribute very much to the story (other than serving as plot devices in the climax). The reason these characters are here is to expand the worldbuilding, and wrap up all the mysteries. But even if I cared about the worldbuilding in the first place, this would’ve fallen flat for me, because Jackson makes the world so complicated. There are allusions to tons of characters who we only barely meet and never get to know or care about, and the backstory to all of the characters gets too convoluted to keep track of. And why should I try to keep track? The world is boring - Jackson doesn’t change that as she expands it. The complexity of the mythos reminded me most of the Kiesha’Ra series, but where that world was inventive and immersive, this one is unoriginal and flat. The effect of all this is that when the (admittedly well-written) climax finally arrives, it’s too little too late. It doesn’t feel like it’s answering any buildup, it just feels tacked-on and obligatory. (It doesn’t help that Remi’s grandfather is kind of a boring villain.) On the whole, the plot completely falls flat, and it’s a big part of the reason this book was such a chore to get through.
The romance didn’t help either. I might not have minded the middle act of the book so much if I had any investment in Remi and Gabe’s romance, but I really don’t. We’re told that Remi has some sort of great chemistry with Gabe, but I never really saw it. Quite frankly, as a character, he’s not very different from Asher, Remi’s previous boyfriend - I have no idea why he’s supposed to be so much better for her than he was. There are also plenty of subplots involving other characters, but none of them particularly stood out to me. A lot of the drama felt manufactured - Remi’s subplot with Lucy, for example, hinged largely on a misunderstanding that struck me as very easy to resolve. Remi is still a well-rendered character, and she did get some sort of arc in this book, which is better than what we got in Pushed. But in the end, I never cared about it very much. I mostly just wanted to get through this book, and the characters didn’t stand out enough to change that.
I’ve now read all four books that Jackson has released, and this is easily the worst. I still want to believe that Jackson can write another novel as good as If I Lie if she returns to contemporary. But it’s been more than a year since this book was released, and she hasn’t even announced another novel or even a short story since then. So until then, it looks like I’ll have to go to other authors to satisfy my cravings. It really is a shame that Jackson let me down this much - I never had high expectations for this series, exactly, but I expected better than this.
This book is an unnecessary sequel to a book that shouldn’t have been written in the first place. Touched (2013) was a waste of Jackson’s considerable talent - her debut novel, If I Lie (2012), was a compelling contemporary novel, and one of the best debuts I’ve ever read. So it’s baffling to be that Jackson chose to follow up that very good contemporary novel with a much less inspired fantasy trilogy. I don’t hate or even dislike Touched, but it’s hard to read it without the underlying sense that Jackson could be doing so much better. Touched also ends with a rather resolute ending. Sure, perhaps the romantic subplots could’ve been taken further, but the main plot came to a satisfying conclusion, and there was no particular reason to add to it. All that considered, this book is considerably better than I expected it to be. That’s not to say that it’s good, but I was surprised by how much effort was put into it. As it turns out, Jackson continued the story of Touched because she did have more ideas for where the plot could go, and I was surprised how much I was engaged at the story she tells here. I still think this is worse than Touched, simply because the character interactions don’t work as well here. But this is a good bit better than I expected, and while I definitely wouldn’t recommend this to anyone who disliked Touched, if you’re a fan of this series, you definitely dodged a bullet.
I’m not going to bother summarizing the plot, because knowing what this book is about probably won’t affect whether most people read this book, and it’s honestly very difficult to make it sound interesting without spoiling it. But it’s worth noting that I was genuinely surprised by the direction that Jackson decided to take the series in. She delves deeper into the worldbuilding, and while it’s still not exactly the most interesting urban fantasy setting I’ve ever read, things do get a lot more engaging than they were in the first book. In the plot itself, there are some predictable beats, but there are also some very unexpected twists and turns. There’s a significant amount of tension as we build up to the climax, moreso than in Touched. There are some flaws - Jackson makes the big mistake of writing two scenes that could serve as climaxes - but for the most part, the story here is more engaging than it was in Touched.
That said, if I had to put my finger on why Touched is a better novel, it’s definitely the characterization. Remy’s character arc doesn’t progress very much throughout this book, and her voice is bland enough that I started to get bored of her. She also has a depressing lack of chemistry with Asher. I had a lot of trouble getting invested in their relationship, which is a bit of a problem in a paranormal romance book. Their loving moments always felt forced and dispassionate to me. The side characters tended to be much better developed, but it wasn’t enough to make up for the vacuum in the center of the story.
And that’s about all I have to say about this book. If I had to outline the biggest problem with this series as a whole, it’s a general lack of noteworthy content for me to comment on. Both this book and Touched are just generally forgettable and inoffensive. This is probably the shortest review I’ve ever written for this blog, because there are only so many ways to describe mediocrity. I can definitely picture If I Lie having a cult following ten years from now - I don’t see that happening with this series. I definitely hope that, once this trilogy is over, Jackson goes back to what she’s good at. If you liked Touched, this book is around the same quality level - for an unnecessary sequel like this one, it’s about the best you could’ve hoped for. But it’s not my cup of tea.
The first book I read by Corrine Jackson was If I Lie (2012). It was a contemporary book about a girl who cheated on her boyfriend who was away with the military, and it was excellent - almost miraculously so, given how easy it would be to screw up the premise. In that book, Jackson demonstrated herself to be extremely talented in writing unique contemporary YA. That’s why I was very surprised to find out that Jackson's next book was a paranormal romance with a fairly generic premise. I actually went to Jackson's website to make sure it was the same Corrine Jackson. But apparently, Jackson's interests in literature are very varied, because this book bears almost no resemblance to If I Lie. They share none of the same themes, and few similarities in writing style. I do see some similar characters, but they're characterized in very different ways. And unfortunately, If I Lie was way better. I'm not saying this was bad, because there are some good elements, but it's difficult to read it without thinking about how much better If I Lie was.
The worst thing about this book was definitely how much Jackson leans on paranormal romance cliches. The mythology on display was well-established and consistent, but utterly boring. Basically, there are Healers and Protectors, the Healers can heal people, the Protectors are supposed to protect them. The Healers abused the Protectors, so the Protectors revolted against the healers, which makes it a problem for our protagonist, who's a Healer. She falls in love with a Protector, creating our obligatory forbidden romance. It's a bit more complex than that, but I can barely describe it without falling asleep. It's just a very typical and surface-level conceit for an urban fantasy novel. It's not totally a backdrop for the forbidden romance, at least - the main plot actually involves Remy escaping her abusive stepfather - but it's still very forgettable. Not helping things was the insta-love - Remy and Asher seemed dedicated to each other after they had barely met. It was bizarre and unrealistic, especially since I know Jackson is capable of being far more subtle than that. This book has gotten a lot of accusations of being a Twilight (2005) rip-off, and while I don’t think that’s totally fair, they do share the same lackluster worldbuilding and insta-love - it’s as if Jackson doesn’t know how to write a paranormal romance without leaning on very typical tropes.
But once you get past that, it's not a bad novel. Remy's voice is kinda bland, but she is a well-developed protagonist. Asher is also pretty well-developed, and even though there was insta-love, I was relieved to see that he's not creepy; his worst crime is just not having much chemistry with Remy. Gabe, Asher's asshole brother, was probably my favorite character. (Another big relief was that he wasn't part of a love triangle with Remy). Jackson did a good job of using him to show the attitudes towards Healers typical among Protectors, without making him into an unsympathetic asshole. I wouldn't call it groundbreaking exactly, but it was fairly well-executed. I could understand him a lot better than I can usually understand characters in his position. The character development is, I’m thankful to say, just as strong here as it was in If I Lie.
The best aspect of the novel, though, was the plot. It was slow, at first, and I though it would be a snoozefest. But Jackson actually writes a subtle but effective dramatic structure as the novel builds up to the climax, a fight scene against Dean (Remy’s stepfather). I was surprised by how moved I was at the end to see him out of her life. The buildup was very subtle, perhaps too subtle, as the first act is pretty boring. But it's worth it when it arrives. There is an effective sense of tension as the third act occurs, and the slower pace gives some genuine suspense, as well as giving us time for character development. It’s not exactly thrilling, but for the more low-key novel Jackson was going for, it works.
I know this review probably seemed pretty negative. But really, this book wasn't bad. It's just hard to be positive when If I Lie was so much better; this feels like a waste of Jackson's potential. And I was even more disappointed when I found out this was a trilogy. There's no real reason to have more to the series, and I want Jackson to get back to the contemporary writing that she's clearly so much more suited for. This is a decent book, but not the great book that I wanted from Jackson.
