TL;DR just another vampire bandwagon book
TBR #1392, added Aug 3, 2015
finished 12/23/16
Whatever copy everyone else on Goodreads got, can I get my hands on that? Because I clearly did not read the same book as them.
Savor was pretty solidly "okay" at the beginning. The premise and execution of the first few chapters were a little hard to believe, but it wasn't all that bad if you weren't taking it super seriously. Aaaand then it just got steadily worse once the plot started to move.
My biggest complaint is the "**Now professionally edited!**" on the book's Amazon page. That actually gave me some faith when I started the book, because hey, it means it's been revised! Any errors that might've been there before should be fixed up, right?
Nooooooo.
A screenshot for posterity, taken on Dec 23, 2016. I added the little red box around the phrase in question.
I didn't notice anything at the very beginning, but as I continued further into the book, the grammar and overall editing took a very noticeable nosedive. The "professional editing" had definitely disappeared by the halfway mark, making the second half read like a rough draft than a polished final copy. I finally started using Kindle's note-taking feature, and thanks to the wonders of Goodreads, you can see the (non-spoiler) comments that I made publicly visible. By the time we get around to Claire's debutante ball, there are so many misplaced commas and character inconsistencies that the only reason I finished was to see how much it could continue spiraling downwards.
(At least I don't regret that decision. The last 10% of the book or so was ... wild to say the least. Nothing like throwing most of the action and two lackluster plot twists into the last two chapters of the book.)
The book starts off with Claire donating blood to the ruling vampire family of her region that's never actually given a name, and then the next day the vampire family is like, "Surprise! We're making you our new daughter and future heir" even though this concept had obviously never been brought up before. And then everything that follows is increasingly more contrived. Nothing felt like a natural progression of events -- everything was obviously stacked together to make the plot more ~dramatic~. We do eventually get some info-dump explanations at the very end but those reasons also feel completely contrived to make this story work. And, you know, would have worked a lot better if there had been any groundwork laid in the first 85% of the story for those ~revelations~, but alas.
The characters were also all completely contrived. Somehow they were all caricatures of character archetypes and inconsistent at the same time. None of their motivations were convincing and by halfway through the book they were all obviously marionettes making the plot move along its railroad.
(It's a phrase I stole from playing D&D all of three times, but I think it's relevant: none of the characters have any real motivations that conflict with the plot. They exist to further the plot. What do all the other characters do when they're not thinking about Claire? Who knows! Why does Claire suddenly change her mind and mourn her human life? As a reader I was given no reasons why she should really miss her absent mom and shallow friend, and Claire's dream of "making a difference in the world" was never specified more than that. No specifics like wanting to be a doctor or a politician or an inventor. Just a bland hand-wave-y goal that isn't even mentioned until 64% into the book.)
I also feel the need to discuss the huge lack of worldbuilding or general consideration for this setting as a whole outside of what's going on with Claire. There's no real explanation of how the Noire family actually got into power, or how they've kept it for so long when they're obviously not doing anything but taking up resources in a large palace. There's no mention of them being actual politicians or appeasing the humans, and yet somehow a good majority of the population is still willing to donate blood to them once a month?
And as a geography major, I feel particularly slighted at the complete oversight of how the real world functions and how that would differ from this vampire-ruled society they set up. Obviously the vampire ruling families have cut the regions off from one another, and yet the world Claire lives in has all the modern wonders of globalization like TVs and Mercedes cars. (The Mercedes was specifically mentioned by name.) There is one region that's given a name, and that's not until the last 2% of the book during one of the plot twists.
Spoiler alert: even if the isolation was a fairly recent thing (which based on the Noire's rule, it's not), this America-coded setting would not survive on its own. We import more than we export. We could collapse in a heartbeat if we were ever cut off from the rest of the world.
*ahem* /end geography rant
As a final note, the attempt at the plot twists was kind of amusing. The first one is such a cliche that you can catch it at the first instance of foreshadowing (not to mention that it's about as subtle as Claire's mood swings). The second one was just a nice way to completely dismantle everything that had been established in Savor, basically making the entire read a waste of time.
TL;DR I was completely misled by the Amazon description boasting the book has been "professionally edited". The whole story felt like jamming various elements together to force them to work, instead of characterization and narration and plot etc. being woven together.
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