Review: Lore

Lore by Alexandra Bracken
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Okay...so a lot of the time I pick up an Alexandra Bracken book after months, if not years, of looking forward to it and I find it interesting to start off. But her narratives historically tend to sacrifice a lot of action for dead air and bloat to pump up the page count, and I'm sorry to say that her latest was no exception. Though promising an action-packed sort of Hunger Games starring the Greek gods - in modern-day New York so as to resemble the stories of Percy Jackson, especially The Last Olympian - Bracken gives us a slate of characters who fill several pages of dramatis personae, but prove surprisingly lifeless in practice. Even with a lot of exciting promise - family revenge on Lore's part, especially, since her family was all killed in the last round of the Agon - the combination of Bracken's usual stagnant storyline speeds and a seriously detached third person narration with sporadic flashbacks don't serve this novel well at all. I don't usually give one star except as a DNF, but I was skimming this book so severely by the end that it might as well have been a DNF for me. With apologies to Bracken's many fans, but hopefully she'll have something better with her next publication.

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