Reviewed by Katie King on
Abandoned.
Once in a while, there comes a book that you just can't finish. It might be that the plot is terrible or there's too much exposition. No matter how hard you try, you can't get past the shortcomings long enough to actually read the words on the pages. Seeker is one of those books for me. I gave up on it at 65% after trying to read it for like six months, maybe even longer than that. SIX MONTHS! That is a long time to try to read the same book.
At first the story was interesting, but then as things went on and got more complicated, I realized nothing was being explained and I was pretty lost. Quin and her friends Shinobu (guess what race he is, go on) and John are Seekers-in-training, which seem like arbitrators of justice or something. They all live and train on a grand estate in Scotland/not-Scotland owned by Quin's dad, who is also their teacher. They go to take their final test and swear their oath, but John (who has a classic I'll-never-be-good-enough chip on his shoulder) fails and decides to get revenge by setting fire to the whole place (or something). Quin and Shinobu also realize that Seekers are just assassins. In the ensuing chaos, Quin and Shinobu jump in a portal to...Hong Kong/not-Hong Kong/someplace...where they live separate lives for 18 months or something until John finds them again.
That's the whole story for 65% of the book! So much of it is intertwined with random backstory that not only has unclear relevance, but is spouted off and then skipped over like it was so obvious what it meant. "Blah blah, he held my mom captive and she's this ghost of a corpse now, okay back to my revenge"...what?!?! Then there was the whole portal time jump or whatever (see, I don't even know what it was) and I'm not sure where in time the rest of the story took place. It says 18 months later, but 18 months from when? From when they landed in Hong Kong/not-Hong Kong but where in time was Scotland/not-Scotland taking place? Several hundred years earlier? In the earlier part in Scotland/not-Scotland, I got the impression they dressed and lived like they were in 1600s or something but they had some pretty advanced technology in Hong Kong/not-Hong Kong. Did they time jump? Did they portal jump? Did they do both? I have no idea.
To top it all off, there is a lot of random stuff with Quin's mommy and daddy issues and her random love triangle (or maybe not? It was hard to tell!) that was confusing. I have no idea what or how or why anything was happening, because nothing was really explained. Are Quin and John in love or is he just lusting after her? Does Quin feel something for Shinobu or is John just paranoid jealous? Are Quin's parents in love or does her dad just let her mom live there? Is Quin's mom a drunk or is she actually someone we should care about? What do all the words the characters keep using mean??
From what I THINK might have been going on, this could've been really good, but it was really poorly executed. Like SO poorly executed that I don't know how anyone could read this and understand anything. How do you categorize this book? How do you read it and come away with a good handle on the plot? It's like the author had a ton of ideas but didn't know how or didn't want to try to integrate them all, so they just DUMPED it all in one book and closed their laptop for the day. Needless to say, it didn't work.
Reading updates
- Started reading
- 1 January, 2015: Finished reading
- 1 January, 2015: Reviewed