I hope the author reads this.
I'm really giving it 2.5 stars. The story has huge potential, but the characters are completely contrived. The dialogue is atrocious, and the supposed 300-year-old tiger is more modern than the main character. There is a rift in Kelsey's personality that I just can't fathom. On one hand, she's incredibly sarcastic and fiery, but on the other hand, she's demure, polite, and ridiculously matronly. She speaks as a grandma would speak. I half expected her to use words like "Dungarees" for jeans or "Frigidaire" for refrigerator like my granny does. (At one point, she uses the phrase "wily scoundrel." I don't know anyone below the age of eighty that would use that phrase.) It just doesn't fit. She's not a well developed character, and the supposed grief she feels for her parents seems fabricated, when it's present. Kelsey has these bouts of intense feeling, then all of a sudden, it's gone. Like when she's mad at Ren and Mr. Kadam for leading her through the jungle. Or better yet, when Ren changes into a human for the first time. There was this huge denial, then resigned acceptance. Nothing in between. Also, Ren and Kishan are completely modern and familiar with modern conveniences, but have been pretty detached from their own humanity for 300 years. There was no working through the animal to become human for either of them. They both automatically adapted to being human. That didn't make any sense, especially for Ren, who had been completely trapped as a tiger. Mr. Kadam is contrived, cliched, and void of anything true. It's like he only has one mood. His interactions with Kelsey, though smooth in the story, would be incredibly awkward to any real person. Kelsey talks about finding these feelings of trust for these people, but gives no reason for it, then she talks about distrust, and gives no reason for it. It just doesn't work. The author clearly has trouble communicating how people really interact. It's like she has an ideal of how things SHOULD be, and tries to force that into a story where that ideal just doesn't fit. She has no notion of how teens speak or act. (I understand keeping things clean, but dialogue can be clean and modern, but if she wants to keep it uber clean, then maybe the characters shouldn't be making out as much as they do.) She obviously doesn't know how to express grief, or much of anything, with words. There are just these huge disconnected parts that don't fit together. I wonder how this book made it past the editing stage. That being said, the story IS interesting. It DOES have huge potential. It just needs a lot of work. A WHOLE lot of work.
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