rameau's ramblings

Reader discretion advised: This isn't going to be pretty. It's going to be a downright nasty review. At first I though this would be a standard young adult novel about a high school kid growing up, spending way too much time thinking about boys with a hint of what happened to her parents mystery thrown in. And the very beginning seemed to support that hypothesis. I actually thought I'd end up liking this book and how it was written.Then I started thinking that everyone around the main protagonist was written to be creepy for a reason, and this was actually a psychological study of a breaking mind with a hint of paranormal thrown into the mix. Well, I certainly was wrong again.In the end, though, it just turned out to be a big mess. I've read my fair share of crime mysteries, but honestly the thought that this book might be one of those whodunnit novels didn't enter my mind until half way through when I stopped to read a review of this book. Insert an ugly laugh here, because that was my initial reaction. There's no rhyme or reason to how the characters behave from the characterisation standpoint and there's even less rationality from the mystery viewpoint. There are certain rules all good detective stories seem to follow, and this one fails at all of them. First of all, our hero or heroine is supposed to be capable of independent thought. I found no evidence to support this hypothesis from the pages I managed to decipher. Trinity Rose appeared to have two thoughts in her head: Chase and woe is me! Speaking of Chase, he comes across as a creepy stalker type à la Edward Cullen. No, he doesn't watch her sleep, but I'm inclined to think that has more to do with the door code and her aunt actually keeping an eye on T than his conscience. Then there are the clues. What clues? Only clues I detected were Trinity's dreams or hallucinations, which had very little to do with the actual mystery. It'd been better if the author had forgotten the mystery altogether, because applying basic logic I was able to successfully deduce the culprit without actually paying any attention to the story between chapter three and thirty-one. He's one of the three people old enough to have commit the original crimes.Had the author forgone the attempt to mesh together the inane internal chatter of an emerging schizophrenic and a serial killer murder mystery, and had she spent that time to create a truly likeable character with a non-vomit-inducing voice I might have liked this book. I'm not claiming I would have, but I might have. I received a copy of this book from the publisher through NetGalley.