Review Thursday- Kings & Queens

Kings & Queens by Courtney Vail 

Published July 4th 2011 by Little Prince Publishing

Seventeen-year-old Majesty Alistair wants police to look further into her father’s fatal car wreck, hopes the baseball team she manages can reclaim the state crown, aches for Derek…or, no…maybe Alec…maybe. And she mostly wishes to retract the hateful words she said to her dad right before slamming the door in his face, only to never see him again.

All her desires get sidelined, though, when she overhears two fellow students planning a church massacre. She doubts cops will follow up on her tip since they’re sick of her coming around with notions of possible crimes-in-the-works. And it’s not like she cries wolf. Not really. They’d be freaked too, but they’re not the ones suffering from bloody dreams that hint at disaster like some crazy, street guy forecasting the Apocalypse.

This book is about Majesty or ‘Maj’ (btw what kind of name is that anyways?) Who over hears a plot to massacre a Church.  Throughout the book we are introduced to a barrage of characters, all of whom seem to have some kind of tragic back story. I often felt lost and confused due to this.

Before I get further into my review I want to start with the authors writing style. I’m not a fan and found it quite annoying. The author had a tendency to leave out words at the beginning of sentences, such as I, A, but, it and several others. For example: “Where is my scrunchy, brat? Was on my nightstand this morning.” “That junk’s not even craptastic. Nearly vomited.” These sentences should be “It was on my nightstand” and “I nearly vomited”.  I found this highly annoying as it was like this throughout the entire book. I almost stopped reading because of it.

As the story line goes, I’m afraid I found myself lost and confused. As I mentioned above, every character that was introduced had some sad and tragic back story. I lost track of who in this book had a dead parent. There was just so much going on; it was hard to follow at times. I felt like the story was rushed at times, it feels to be written a bit chaotically and a little thrown together.

 I liked the idea behind the book, the whole evil corporation that’s trying to control people or see who’s going to be evil. I found that to be intriguing, but with all the other stuff being thrown at you it often got confusing.  As far as the main characters go, I did like Majesty and Alec to a certain extent. Derek was just okay, but towards the end I didn’t really like him anymore.  The whole ‘I found Jesus’ thing was just random and added to the confusion.

I also don’t understand the authors need to toss in a tragic back story for Majesty’s mom. Her being molested by her uncle as a child and deciding to now go to the police about it had nothing to do with the book. I was also annoyed by the author adding that Majesty’s mom finds out she is 5 months pregnant with her dead dad’s baby. There was no need for that. And the fact that her mom had a “companion” just 5 months after the death of her husband is insane. If my husband died just 5 months ago, the last thing on my mind would be having another man in my life.

By the end of the book I was hoping for a super awesome conclusion, but was left wondering what the heck? Over all I feel that this could have been a whole lot better, if the writing style were to be changed, and if the author would leave out some of the details she put in and made it less confusing.

My rating: 2/5 stars