Thursday, September 5, 2013

Review: Hollowland by Amanda Hocking

Summary:  Nineteen-year-old Remy King is on a mission to get across the wasteland of America and nothing will stand in her way-- not violent marauders, a spoiled rock star, or an army of flesh-eating zombies.

Review:  This is the second book I've read by Amanda Hocking.  The first one didn't excite me enough to get me to buy the rest of the series, but this one was free so I decided to take a chance.  Remy is a kickass character (of course), but it' never explained how she got that way.  When the story begins, we're already in zombie-land.  I wanted to know about this girl's past, but we are told very little.  There is a lot of action, but after a while it got redundant.  This is the way it went: Remy and her friends meet a few people, go through introductions, and then the new people die in a chapter or two.  When we got to the third group, I was like, "I don't care what your names are because you're just going to die anyway." And they did. 

I don't know what it is about Hocking's books that don't rope me in like they do other people.  I've given it a great deal of thought.  She writes well (in my opinion), and I enjoy the stories as I am reading them, but I don't feel invested in the characters.  I don't care if they live or die.  I don't care enough to read the next book.  It bugs me because I just can't figure out WHY I feel that way about it.  Maybe it's because there isn't hardly any backstory on the characters.  Or maybe it's because Hocking is more interested in the action than in her characters.  I don't know.

I give her three butterflies for a story that kept me reading but didn't intrigue me enough to continue on with the series.




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