The Promise Of Amazing

by Robin Constantine

[KitsuneBae]

Actual Rating: 2.5 stars

This post first appeared on: Thoughts and Pens.

Belated Happy New Year!

I know it’s kind of a bad omen to start this wonderful year with a negative review but can’t help it. It’s already past the deadline. xD The New Year Celebration really got to me. But anyway, let’s proceed…

The first thought that came to mind after reading this book was, “Contemporaries really hate me.” I gave this book my all but it was also determined to discourage me from taking things to a new level. The Promise of Amazing has a cute premise. Wren Caswell is studying at Sacred Hearts, a school exclusive for female students only. Unlike other YA heroines, Wren’s beautiful, ambitious, academically competitive and certainly knew how to bait a guy she likes. Our hero, Grayson shares the same traits so when their paths crossed, it was attraction at first sight.

Okay. So stories like this have already saturated the YA contemporary market but I still gave it a go because I was looking for a break from reading fantasies and dystopias. The Promise of Amazing started strong. The characters immediately stood out to me. Wren is a character that I like to identify myself with. She’s not only beautiful but she’s also intelligent, focused and confident without becoming the stereotype mean girl at school. As for Grayson, he’s definitely a bad boy but it wasn’t clear at first because he was this gorgeous, happy go lucky charmer. As I went deeper into the story, I found myself gradually disengaging from them. Wren suddenly became this sexually hungry teenager scheming and bidding her time to lure Grayson into her, uhm, bed. And that’s not the worst; she also found herself getting aroused by Luke’s—Gray’s asshole of a friend—kisses. Seriously? Apart from a few short meetings, she really didn’t know the guy and she was going out with Gray for crying out loud. Speaking of Gray, he’s one of the douchiest male leads who graced the YA lit. I was absolutely rooting for him because I love bad boys and well, I was looking forward on how Constantine will redeem his character. The author attempted though but it wasn’t enough. It felt forced and rushed.

After the characters disappointed me, I thought the plot–albeit predictable–would compensate for my annoyance. But nope. It just exacerbated the negative feelings I have for this book. A lot of the things that occurred in The Promise of Amazing hardly made sense at all. What exactly are the motivations of these characters to make them behave like this and like that? What is really the whole point of the story aside from that horrible instalove? It was like the author was just making things up along the way.

Only the dynamic familial relationship saved this book from sleeping on my 1 star shelf. The bond of Wren’s family and of Grayson’s represented realism mirroring that of today’s families. But still it was inadequate for this book to merit a 3 star rating. The ending didn’t help either to sway my decision.

In an overall assessment, I didn’t hate The Promise of Amazing. At some point, I did enjoy the banter between Wren and Gray but the author could have done a way way better job than this.

***An ARC of this book was freely provided by the publisher via Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review. Thank you, Balzer and Bray***