Revel by Maurissa Guibord

TL;DR weird mythology stuff happens

(finished 10/9/15)

TBR #208, added Feb 25 2013

Revel's been on my TBR list for a long time. The fact that it was 208 out of about 1500 is pretty impressive. I'd actually forgotten about it, and I think I just picked it up from the library on a whim without realizing it was on my TBR. (But let's be honest, I have about 75% of my library's YA section on my TBR, so the chances were pretty high.)

The worldbuilding was nice, but I'm not sure that is was necessarily completely unique or believable. It had a good aesthetic. I've only been up on the New England coast once, but every book I've read that's set there seems to be creepy / foggy-unsettling, and that's not what it was like when I went. (Maybe my experience was out of the ordinary. I don't know.)

I didn't really understand what the plot was supposed to be about when I picked Revel up, so I kind of went in blind. With that, I had a weird mix between "what is going on" and "I'm pretty sure this is foreshadowing" (and being right about that). The foreshadowing was kind of heavy-handed -- I'm not sure the plot twist at 55% was supposed to be surprising to the reader, but Delia's reaction fell short because I'd seen it coming from pretty early on.

After that 55% mark, though, everything took a really weird turn that I wasn't expecting when I had picked up the book. There was very little indication of it in the blurb and in the beginning (which I guess can be explained with kind of being a mystery), and I'm not sure I would've picked the book up if I'd known about it. The second half of the book wasn't bad, considering I got through the last 45% in about an hour, but it was a strange mix between taking an aspect of YA Paranormal I hadn't really seen before and yet still feeling like all the fairly mediocre  YA Paranormal books I've read.

I was really indifferent to the romance. I didn't really like Delia and Jax's romance, but there wasn't necessarily anything bad about it other than them being fairly insta-love-y. Even at that, though, it wasn't necessarily instalove.They took a few chapters. (The fact that I'm giving the romance the benefit of the doubt because of this is really depressing. Why is the standard for romance in YA so low?) Some of the reviews on Goodreads mentioned an attempt at a love triangle, but I either didn't read it that way or it was so poor I completely missed it.

Unrelated to the main romance aspects, there's a cw for mentions / attempts of sexual assault. Nothing really happens within the narration but it does kind of tie into the plot. I'm very conflicted as to how I feel about it being a bigger part of the plot than I expected. It reflects human corruption and all that, and I don't think the topic is really misused, per se, but I think the plot could've also worked just as well without it. It does seem like it was used as a kind of shock factor.

The characters felt kind of flat. I made a note that they were kind of inconsistent, but the only example I can think of is Delia's grandmother. Her behavior changed significantly over the course of a few chapters, and there was a reasoning for it in the beginning, but the reasoning kind of just got tossed aside. I never connected to any of the characters, and none of them seemed very human, but they functioned. I think a lot of the plot would've functioned better if they had been a little more human instead of just feeling like characters, but that might just be me.

Jax and the other characters of his kind (were they ever given a name?) were kind of baffling to me. There's apparently supposed to be Greek mythology tied into the plot, but almost my entire understanding of that comes from Percy Jackson, so I was very "???" for a good portion of the story. Besides, Percy Jackson has a better explanation for their setting than Revel does. I was pretty disappointed with how Revel's setting and tie-in to the mythology were described and built up.

The ending was really open-ended, which I actually was kind of disappointed with. I mean, it's kind of to be expected since Revel is a standalone, but the ending didn't really establish anything. Stuff happens and then it's like "well alright we're done".

I only have two sticky notes, so I'm just going to add them into this post:

He bounced back and I let out the breath I hadn't realized I'd been holding. (pg 5)

I'd never seen a dead person before and really, really wished I could erase the picture from my mind. (pg 113)

The first one is fairly self-explanatory. In regards to the second quote: I'm pretty sure she had to have seen her mom after she died. There's no way she could've gotten around not seeing her mom after her death if she was the only living family left. I'm really surprised this quote managed to stay in despite the fact that it directly contradicts the premise of the story.

TL;DR it was a pretty standard YA Paranormal, nothing ground-breaking and honestly a little more confusing than satisfying.