Reviewed by Angie on
The idea behind Olivia Twisted is pretty awesome: an orphaned, female, hacker retelling of Oliver Twist. Unfortunately, it's a disaster, and not even one that I couldn't tear my eyes away from. I did like it at first, but things went downhill fast. A lot of the plot points make no sense and caused a lot of eye-rolling and some rage, Olivia has no personality whatsoever, and parts were so boring that I resulted to skimming. Not to mention is took me over two days to finish it, which is absurd for me if I have nothing else to do. Which I didn't. Anyway, about the story: It follows sixteen year old Olivia as she's dropped off at her latest foster home. Once she starts school she meets Z in their computer class and quickly learns that they both have hacking skills. Then Z tries to recruit her to work for his group home, which is essentially a crime ring run by teenage hackers. Sounds pretty unique and interesting, but it wasn't.
My first issue with Olivia Twisted came at around the 15-20% mark. Liv goes to teen night at a club with her new friend Sam, where she gets roofied. Sam and Z take her home, and the next morning she admits what happened to her foster dad. Neither of them do anything about it. In fact, he just offers to drive her to school and be home in the afternoon so she won't be alone. Since, of course the guy who drugged her is going to be stalking her now or something. At school Liv confronts the guy who gave her the drink, he denies spiking it, and she just accepts that and starts thinking Z is the culprit. And yet instead of avoiding him because she thinks he's a bad guy, she falls in love with him. WTF is that?! Plus the whole drugged, attempted rape thing isn't brought up again until about two thirds in and by then it's totally overkill since the real culprit has done enough creeptastic stuff to begin with! Why did this need to be included?! It added nothing to the story, and there was no bigger message about how to deal with it if it were to happen. It's just a horrible plot device!
My second issue with Olivia Twisted was Z and Sam. Sam is another personalityless cardboard cut out like Olivia, and she manipulates her just as much as Z does. They both want her to come work with them, but instead of maybe hinting at it and inviting her over to see what it's all about, they do a lot of dirty things. Sam gets her to steal from the mall as some kind of test. I really don't get how making your supposed new BFF steal is suppose to build trust or interest, but whatever. Then Z uses his hottie status to seduce her, changes her grades so he can offer to tutor her and spend more time with her. Well, eventually they do invite her over and Liv is immediately interested in their hacking competitions and what not. See, befriending her, inviting her over totally worked, so everything else became unnecessary and a waste of pages.
As for the plot...what plot?! Most of Olivia Twisted is just Olivia and Z either being antagonistic toward each other or them making out. Plus Z mopes around a lot about how he needs Olivia to do the job, but he doesn't want this life for her because he loves her, but blah blah blah. It isn't until about 80% when any kind of tense plot shows up, but by this point my brain had already checked out. This part also induced a ton of eye rolling because Olivia's reactions are just ridiculous and make no kind of logical sense. Then it ends, and I was kind of glad for the non-stereotypical happy ending where the bad boy is reformed by the power of love from an innocent girl. But the epilogue happened and I had to roll my eyes some more.
So, clearly I did not Olivia Twisted at all. It was a chore to even finish, and that whole roofie arc just made me want to throw the book across the room. Although I love my Kindle too much for that, and it's not her fault that this book was rage inducing. Olivia Twisted seriously had a great premise, but it failed on so many levels. I can't even comprehend how wrong things went in this book for me. I was hoping the second half would redeem it, and that something would finally happen besides Z's annoying back and forth about Liv, but nope. Very, very disappointing.
Read more of my reviews at Pinkindle Reads & Reviews.
Reading updates
- Started reading
- 20 October, 2013: Finished reading
- 20 October, 2013: Reviewed