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chiara

Chiara

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A Storm of Swords
George R.R. Martin

Ultraviolet by R.J. Anderson

Ultraviolet - R.J. Anderson

The first three quarters of the book were great. After that, it went downhill. No, not just downhill, it crashed and tumbled into the valley beneath.

 

So it started out great. I loved everything about it: a girl, Alison, with a special ability (in this case synesthesia which I found really interesting), her being in a psychiatric institution and struggling with herself (she wasn't crazy, right?), the unsolved mystery of the disappearance (or murder) of Tori Beaugrand and what Alison had to do with it. But then things started happening that I didn't love. There was for example no reason whatsoever for Alison to have this synesthesia. There was just a small part of it that connected to the story and it felt more like something to add more story to the book when this wasn't really necessary. It kind of felt like ''Oh the story is still kind of flat.. Let's add something that doesn't have anything to do with the main story line!''

 

Also, if you add something like this, at least make it good. It was interesting in the beginning but later on I didn't like the way the synesthesia and Alison's view of the world were described. It felt like a bit too much and sometimes you read about these weird things but they are still totally realistic, but that wasn't the case in Ultraviolet. It really started out as a great story and it had so much potential but it just didn't live up to that. I expected some great psychological twist at the end, but no, something entirely else showed up. 


But besides the descriptions of the synesthesia thing, the first three quarters of the book were great. The last quarter, though, took a completely different turn. Suddenly it had all to do with this one thing which, in my opinion, ruined the entire book. Sure, the synesthesia thing was annoying at times but I could live with that. It was still interesting. But then everything suddenly revolved about this one thing and that blew it for me (if you read the book, you will know what I’m talking about). There was also almost no mentioning of this thing throughout the entire book until it just suddenly appeared at the end. Maybe I would have liked this part of the story better if there would have been some mystery about this whole thing, and I think Anderson kind of attempted to create some mystery (there were a few suggestions about Sanjay being right) but this didn’t really work out.

Some pieces of the story just didn’t fit together. A lot of things were unfinished and unexplained or got sloppy explanations that didn’t make any sense. Alison’s relationship with the love interest was also very hard to believe. There was no chemistry whatsoever and I found the whole relationship to be kind of weird actually.

 

So overall, I didn’t really like this book. But I did enjoy some things and I was really invested in the story. Because of this and because I do think the first three quarters of the book were good, I’m giving this book 2,5 stars.