The Gifting by K. E. Ganshert – Book Review

Rating: 2/5 stars

Genre: YA paranormal

First published: 2015

Author: K. E. Ganshert

Synopsis: Tess thinks she’s going crazy. And in a world where anything that can’t be explained is deemed a threat to society, being crazy is dangerous. But when she moves to a new town and meets the breathtaking Luka Williams, she realizes that perhaps she isn’t crazy after all. Perhaps the things she’s been seeing are real. 

Book Depository | Goodreads

---

I’m not the biggest fan of the paranormal YA genre, but I did like this book. I was going to give it 3 stars, until the ending. The ending really pissed me off. But I’ll get into that later.

Like I mentioned before, I’m not a huge fan of YA paranormal. It’s rarely well written (in my experience) and it’s very cliched. One of my absolute biggest pet peeves is the new kid in school meets hottie cliche. There’s usually some variation of that in YA paranormal books and this one was no exception. It’s just lazy writing, in my opinion. Such a convenient way for your characters to meet. You don’t need to be creative, don’t need to figure out a good way for the protagonists to cross paths for the first time. They just have AP Biology together, whatever.

However, I was willing to overlook that. Because the writing was good and I was intrigued by Tess and what was going on with her. I wanted to know what exactly it was that Tess was seeing. And I kept being intrigued even though not much was revealed throughout the book. In fact, not that much happened. But there was something that made me keep wanting to read despite the cliches and despite the often snort-worthy plot-holes (like how two 17 year-olds managed, on a whim, to break into a high security government facility without anyone even noticing).

The characters weren’t all that, if you ask me. Just your run-of-the-mill high school tropes: the loner new kid, the brooding, perfect hottie, the gorgeous cheerleader bitch, the jocks, the supper bubbly best friend, the whole spiel. But the concept was pretty interesting. The idea of a world in which religion has been all but outlawed, where anything but the physical was scoffed at and could potentially get you in trouble. It touched on some interesting topics of religion, abortion and genetically engineering humans (although very vaguely). I thought those were very interesting choices and also believable. I could see the world potentially headed in that direction in the near future.

After 300+ pages of not much happening, but all this curiosity building up, the book ends in a cliffhanger. And this really pissed me off. Because it’s not like there was a lot going on, it felt like I was being cheated. I’ve been waiting for 300 pages to find out what is going on, and then I don’t. It’s not the “introducing the next adventure” sort of cliffhanger. It’s the “not finishing this adventure” sort of cliffhanger. And it honestly felt to me like an attempt to get people to buy the next one. Which just makes me angry. I don’t like being manipulated.

I would have gotten the next one if it hadn’t ended like this. I would have bought it, even though I didn’t buy this one (it was free on Kindle). All it would have taken was a few more pages telling me what’s been hinted at for the past 300 pages. I doubt it would take more than that. I bet the first 10 pages of the next book will be an explanation and that’s it. Why couldn’t they have been included in this one and then the story could continue in the second one? But now I’m just really pissed off and I don’t know if I am going to continue reading this series. Just on principle. I may be overreacting seen as I only just finished this book, but I’m just really unhappy with how it ended.

Anyway, if you’re a fan of paranormal YA, you’ll probably like it. It’s one of the better ones in the genre that I’ve seen. That is, if the ending won’t annoy you as much as it annoyed me.