I really thought I was going to like Piercing the Veil by Nicole L. Taylor. The introduction to the book was utterly fascinating and really pulled me right in. I was eagerly awaiting the rest of the book, basically on the edge of my seat to find out what would happen next and what had lead up to that moment. And then we entered the real world with a character who was crazy dull and suffered from the unfortunate circumstance of her author trying way too hard to make her nice and interesting when she was really only rude and dull.
I didn’t hate Alexa, exactly, but I didn’t like her either. In the moments that she wasn’t rather boring and just…stagnant, she was just kind of awful. And no one else in the book was really all that memorable. Her relationship with her siblings was interesting, but ultimately never really developed into anything that was fun to read. I felt like a large portion of the story was just a massive struggle to read through and I literally had to put this book down and pick it up so many times that it just wasn’t enjoyable anymore. It was a real struggle to finish this book, which upsets me largely due to the fact that I had been so genuinely excited to read it initially.
The romance felt unrealistic, leaving me with a lack of understanding for how they could have possibly fallen for each other. Not to mention the fact that it was so stupid instantaneous. While I can, on occasion, ignore insta-love if the book is pretty exceptional, most of the time and especially when the writing is just okay, it becomes just another frustration while reading. The characters never really had any significant development and often times felt placed into the story to be useful in some manner or another to the main character. And I’m sorry, but when such little effort is put into supporting characters, the book suffers for it.
Maybe this one just isn’t for me, but overall I couldn’t bring myself to enjoy it.
I was provided a free copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
🦊🦊