Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Book Review: Crash (Visions Series, #1) by Lisa McMann




Crash (Visions Series Book 1)

Author: Lisa McMan


Purchase on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Synopsis: Jules lives with her family above their restaurant, which means she smells like pizza most of the time and drives their double-meatball-shaped food truck to school. It’s not a recipe for popularity, but she can handle that.

What she can’t handle is the recurring vision that haunts her. Over and over, Jules sees a careening truck hit a building and explode...and nine body bags in the snow.

The vision is everywhere—on billboards, television screens, windows—and she’s the only one who sees it. And the more she sees it, the more she 
sees. The vision is giving her clues, and soon Jules knows what she has to do. Because now she can see the face in one of the body bags, and it’s someone she knows. Someone she has been in love with for as long as she can remember.

Jules has to act—and act fast—to keep her vision from becoming reality.

Brought to you by TeamNerd Reviewer Annabell Cadiz
Warning: Minor spoilers. 

Review: I have not really been a fan of Lisa McMann since her Wake Trilogy. But I had been quite excited when I discovered she would be releasing Crash. The concept sounded really juicy and intense and dark. Crash, though, was none of those things. It was such a sad disappointment.

By the synopsis of the book, the reader is led to believe that he/she can expect a story filled with a breathtaking romance, tension-filled suspense and something epic to happen. None of that ever takes place in the book. Instead the reader is left with a bland, angst-ridden story with a one-note romance that comes off more as psychotic-stalking and supernatural elements that aren’t really all that shocking or really worthy of calling “supernatural.”

Jules is constantly plagued by this vision of a horrible explosion where twelve people are killed and turns out one of those people is the boy she’s been in love with since middle school, Sawyer. She needs to find a way to save him because she just can’t imagine him dying but here’s the thing: Jules and Sawyer don’t talk to each other, don’t hang out, don’t even have the same group of friends. The story wants you to believe in this heartfelt romance but you can’t because whenever Jules and Sawyer happen to have a scene together, which is once in a blue moon, it’s uncomfortably awkward, uncomfortably weird, and doesn’t come off as romance, more so because Jules looks like the crazy, obsessed stalker always trying to warn Sawyer he’s going to die. There is no buildup of any kind to Jules and Sawyer’s romantic feelings for each other. I mean Jules has this scene where she’s warning Sawyer for like the third? fourth? time about the vision and declares she has been in love with him since forever then Sawyer just walks away. But who can blame him? This chick keeps telling him he’s gonna die or is sneaking around his family’s pizzeria or watching him at school. The scenes when Sawyer would wind up alone with Jules or meet up with her in the middle of the night to talk just made him come off like he lacked common sense and self-preservation and intelligence.

There is no plot to this book until you reach the third half of the end. The entire book consists of Jules squabbling with her family over the rivalry they have with Sawyer’s family because of some long ago feud and Jules seeing the vision EVERYWHERE and angsting about it. By the time the reader gets to the final few chapters and the big explosion happens, the secret behind the feud is finally revealed, and the dark secrets Jules family has been hiding come to light, YOU WON’T. CARE. ABOUT. IT! Why? Because the reader has been forced to sit through NOTHING of any real consequence happening for the majority of the read.

Jules was superficial at best and lacked any real development and the same can be said for Sawyer. There is no tension, no suspense, no plot, no characterization, no twists. Just a stale plot with flat characters and a romance that deserves a restraining order to be served.

The only good aspect to the book is Jules relationship with her siblings Trey and Rowan. They have a great bond and really love each other. Outside of that though, there isn’t anything else that saves this book. 

About the Author: Lisa McMann lives and writes in the Phoenix area. Her books include the NYT bestselling paranormal WAKE trilogy, CRYER'S CROSS, DEAD TO YOU, and the dystopian fantasy series beginning with THE UNWANTEDS. (Book 2, Unwanteds: ISLAND OF SILENCE, comes out Sept 4, 2012).

Where to Find the Author

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