Teen Tuesday - Abandon by Meg Cabot

Meg Cabot - Abandon

• Pub. Date: April 26, 2011
• Publisher: Scholastic, Inc.
• Format: Hardcover 320pp
• Age Range: Young Adult
• Rating: ***

My review:

Wow, this was different! For me, for Meg Cabot. Just different. I read it pretty fast when I got a chance to sit down and read it. That means it wasn't tortuously long, but it did seem to drag a little bit. I felt that more time had to have gone by considering how many events occur. However, she does flash back quite a bit, so some of that gets in the middle of Pierce telling the story at hand. The flash backs were appropriate, but they felt a little disorganized at times. Or at least there was no visual indication that she was switching besides the verb tense change. And if she used 'of course' one more time..

Moving on from the technical: I enjoyed this story. Like I said, this was different. And I don't know the myth of Persephone or how close this is to it besides the story we get at the beginning. Pierce is a teenage girl with no ordinary past. She's died, gone to the Underworld, and somehow made her way back to life. This leaves her with scars and memories that she can't let go, and it follows her even to the remote island of Isla Huesos, her mother's home town. Family and friends get caught up in her drama, and she tries to hide her secrets. Pierce tries to protect everyone from evil, as well. It all catches up, though.

As for John, he's barely in the novel. Bits here and there include him, but I guess he just wasn't in there enough for me to fully attach to the notion of Pierce being with him. He's very mysterious. And her cousin Alex was in the book only at the beginning and end. No middle scenes with Alex really existed. I thought he would be more of a major player. It was basically ALL Pierce.

It's a very interesting web, that's for sure. It leaves you hanging just a bit there, and some other things, major elements of the book, have yet to be resolved. That doesn't always a good book make, even if it's been set up as a trilogy. Hopefully everything gets tied up nice and neat by book three.

Side note: I thought Pierce was a weird name for a girl, but then I remembered that this was the retelling of Persephone. Duh.