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| Paper Gods #0.5 |
Pages: 75
Rating: 2/5
Meet two teens whose worlds are about to change forever in this paranormal Young Adult novella, a prequel to Ink by debut author Amanda Sun…
Katie Greene’s worst nightmare comes true when her mother dies, and she’s devastated to learn that she will have to leave the only home she’s ever known. Desperate to find where she belongs, she must decide if she has what it takes to start a new life across the ocean.
For Yuu Tomohiro, every day is a nightmare. He struggles to control his strange ability, and keeps everyone at a distance so they won’t get hurt—even his girlfriend, Myu. At night, a shadow haunts his dreams, and a mysterious woman torments him with omens of death and destruction. But these haunting premonitions are only the beginning…
Having read Ink my expectations for this novella were for the most part fairly low and unfortunately it didn't rise above my expectitions.
Shadow is written through the perpectives of both Tomohiro and Katie based on the events that lead to Ink. In my review for Ink I remarked that it could've benefited from doing just this rather than focusing only on Katie and after reading Shadow I feel like I was on to something. Tomo was far more enjoyable to read than Katie, although that might have had something to do with her being a whiny selfcentred brat for the first half of the novella. It was nice to get some insight into how Tomo thinks and it makes clear some of his actions in Ink.
I had serious problems with Katie in this novella. As I said above, she acted like a whiny selfcentred brat for half of it. Ok, so her mum died and while I haven't had to experience that loss I've lost many close family members so I can relate to it on some level. But seriously, Katie acts like she's the only one in pain because nobody else could possibly feel sad and hurt over her mum's passing, nobody understands how it feels like.
I just couldn't feel sorry for her while she was acting like that. People are just tring to help her and all she can do is complain. She even goes as far as thinking that her Grandparents don't want her or love her anymore because she can't go live with them as she wants. Grow up, you're not a little kid anymore!
However, she did get more bearable once she snapped herself out of it and began taking control of what she could.
I don't know what it was with this novella but some of the writing is just not that great. Some of the sentence structuring was just weird and made my head hurt, and the wording was rather odd. There was this one line:
"The wind tangled and untangled her hair" p. 25
For me the use of the word tangled just didn't work because while wind can tangle hair I have never known the wind to be able to untangle it. I get the image Sun is trying to paint but I feel the wording was worng for it, maybe, the wind blew through her hair or something similar would've worked much better.
Bad use of words aside, the prologue gave me a headache. I think Sun was trying to set up some sort of feeling for the scene, maybe olden time....I don't know. The only reason I feel like she was setting the scene is because this type of wording really only came up in the prologue. Whatever it was she was trying to do didn't work well with me. The entire chapter I sat there restructuring sentences so that they flowed and made sense in my overworked brain. Just so you can get an idea, here is one of them:
"It towered above him, the huge Shinto entrance to Itsukushima Shrine" p6
If it towered above him we get the idea that it's huge, you don't need to show and tell in the same sentence. Also, I feel it would flow better if the sentence was switched with the latter part coming before the former.
Also just a note on the "earthquakes" or whatever. I'm kinda confused, I wasn't sure if it was meant to be used as a tool for foreshadowing or if they're actually meant to mean something. Nothing like them happened once in Ink so I think it was just foreshadowing. If this is the case I found it completely unessessary. It wasn't needed for foreshadowing - Tomo's dreams were enough - and if it adds nothing other than confusion as to why it's there then why use it.
Overall it wasn't a bad addition to the series. It did feel like it was trying to hard at times to create anicipation for Ink which is a shame becuase it did that without the extra effort. The insight into Tomo was great but Katie's behaviour in the first half makes it a little unbearable. People who like Ink are bound to enjoy this while those who didn't are bound to come into the same problems with this novella.
