Review: Turned by Morgan Rice

Turned by Morgan Rice

[Goodreads page]

Author: Morgan Rice. Website|Twitter
Published: 24 January 2011 (Noah Lukeman)
Format: E-book
Pages: 196
Amazon: paperback|Kindle
Waterstone's: paperback
Kobo: e-book

Source: Free Kindle download

Plot Summary (from Goodreads):
Eighteen year old Caitlin Paine finds herself uprooted from her nice suburb and forced to attend a dangerous New York City high school when her Mom moves again. The one ray of light in her new surroundings is Jonah, a new classmate who takes an instant liking to her.

But before their romance can blossom, Caitlin suddenly finds herself changing. She is overcome by a superhuman strength, a sensitivity to light, a desire to feed--by feelings she does not understand. She seeks answers to what’s happening to her, and her cravings lead her to the wrong place at the wrong time. 

My Review:
I got this as a free download from the Kindle store. I'd sort of vaguely heard of the series and author and decided that for free I didn't really have anything to lose! Turned tells the story of Caitlin. She's starting a new school and faces all the drama that comes with it; learning her way round, noticing a cute guy at school, struggling to adjust to her new surroundings whilst all the time battling bouts of rage and a strange craving for blood.

This book was complete and utter silliness. The writing was pretty bad and extremely repetitive. You'd get 5 sentences in a row starting with "she" or "Caitlin" which got annoying pretty quickly. It's a pretty short book and the pacing suffers because of it. Things move along stupidly fast with very little explanation. The back story of Caitlin and her family is barely glossed over.

Then you get to the actual plot. Caitlin's attraction to Jonah was incredibly cheesy, and then he ends up being forgotten about pretty quickly when another guy appears on the scene. Given the title of the series (Vampire Journals) and the completely obvious symptoms Caitlin was having (superhuman strength, a craving for blood...) it took a pretty long time to actually get round to the vampire action. But the low point for me was when Caitlin starts to wonder if maybe if she had a boyfriend everything would be ok. *headdesk*

For the most part the book is told from Caitlin's perspective but then suddenly halfway through, it switches to someone else's perspective, and then shortly after it switches again. It felt completely random to be jumping about like that and it didn't work for me.

Saying all that, I still managed to get through it all. I think if you're looking for 2 hours to kill then this book is perfectly acceptable for that. There's plenty of action towards the end when things kick off but I have no desire to read the rest of the series.

Rating: 2*
What to read next: Loved by Morgan Rice, book 2 in the Vampire Journals series
Books like this: Evernight by Claudia Gray