EMERALD CITY by Alicia K. Leppert

Emerald City
Alicia K. Leppert

Grade: D


Release Date: April 8, 2012


Description from goodreads.com:
Olivia's sad, solitary life in Seattle comes dangerously close to ending one fateful night, if not for a neighbor saving her in the nick of time. Curious about her mysterious rescuer, she seeks him out in hope of getting some answers, but instead finds something she never thought she'd have again.


My thoughts on the book:
This book fell flat for me. Olivia is just whiny. Nothing in her life was bad enough for her to react the way she did about everything. All she did for the majority of the book was, as my mom would put it, "throw pity parties." And as the saying goes, "nobody likes a negative Nancy." Okay. Enough with the colloquialisms, down to the review.


I didn't like Olivia. And not liking the main character makes it hard to enjoy a book. She whines and tries to kill herself and everything because daddy didn't love her and her mom killed herself. Okay, so I'll concede that finding your mom dead from suicide would traumatize a person, but seriously, that's the only thing bad that happened to her. She didn't suffer from abuse. I mean yea she was like a 500 year old virgin, and that's depressing, but past that, and one friend giving up on her because she was so freaking emo, NOTHING BAD HAPPENED. I'm pretty sure most people in the world have had worse lives than she had, yet she made a big stink about it and whined constantly. Jude should have let her off herself. Seriously. It would have saved me a lot of time if she had died on page 5 or whatever. Moving on from that rant...


Jude was an okay character. He was so cryptic that I wanted to smack him, though. I mean he has his reasons, and toward the end, you figure them out, but until then, it's just a bit frustrating. I feel that Leppert drags the whole thing out too long. It made it hard for me to stay focused on the book. Between Jude's cryptic answers and Olivia's whining, I had a very difficult time with this book. 


The pacing of this book is slow-as-molasses, and it's not very exciting until the end. When something finally does happen, the book basically ends. The subplot and action don't have time to even develop before they're over. This makes for a pretty boring read, if you ask me. 


The romance is more G rated than the romance you find in most YA books. That within itself is kind of depressing. I felt no passion from either of them, really. Just really sappy, probably can't be real because it's so flowery, love. Gross. 


The writing itself was well-done. Leppert has a good voice, and I hope that in the future she creates more likable characters. I'd be willing to read another book from her, but I wouldn't be willing to read another book about Olivia and Jude. I enjoyed Leppert's writing style, I just didn't enjoy the story itself. I'm not saying that everyone will react this way to the novel, and I'd recommend checking it out from the library or reading a chapter or so to try it out. A lot of people like this book. I'm just not one of them. 


This ARC was provided to me by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. 


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