Hope (The Descendant Trilogy, #2)

by Theresa M Jones

[Raven]

Read this and other reviews at my blog.

Alison's story continues. With Damien dead, Lilith has taken over the Rising and is now set on making sure Alison dies for her crimes against them. With Alison's new marriage to David, Samantha's powers due to come in any day, and a new baby on the way, Alison has far too much to worry about than focusing on Lilith.

Sophomore novels are difficult. They are hard to master because you have to convey a certain amount of information in a short period. Hope is helping to prepare for a time skip, and it needs to set things up to allow for that to happen. Hope does a decent job of it, but there was some lacking.

The characters are all the same. You get to read more about Lilith and meet a few of the other Rising members, but otherwise the characters have not changed at all. They are still very likeable and leave you wanting to hate the bad ones and root for the good ones.

The story was nice as well. It's a really good set up for the third novel. Information is conveyed nicely. It was the writing that stunted me. This novel felt rushed to me. I noticed quite a few errors that the editor obviously missed or that weren't fixed before publishing. Descriptive words were repeated in sentences too closely to one another. Scenes were either rushed or not described well enough. It didn't read nearly as smoothly and this was a final copy unlike the preview copies I read for Power. The mistakes are all tiny little things, but they are unfortunately noticable. I feel like it needed a few more read-throughs before handed off to the editor. I had expressed my thoughts to Theresa that I thought the release was a rush, but now I feel like a horrible friend for not reading this sooner and encouraging her a bit more to wait. Power sets you up to expect a certain level in her writing and Hope doesn't deliver it.

The story is what is most important, and it really was wonderful. I can't say much without spoiling it flat out, but I did really enjoy it. I just found that I couldn't lose myself in the story as much as I did before because I noticed the lack in the writing that I didn't expect. I hate to have to judge the novel by that, but people do judge those things. I would still recommend this story to anyone who is intrigued by the first book. It was a great story with wonderful characters.