Unspoken

by C.C. Hunter

October 27, 2015 · St. Martin's Griffin

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This RITA® Reader Challenge 2016 review was written by McRedHead. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the YA Romance category.

Here is McRedHead's review:

Recap: Della Tsang, a seventeen-year-old vampire who can also see and speak with ghosts, struggles with the revelation that her uncle may have murdered her aunt. In the meantime, her father acts strange and behaves coldly towards her. She is determined to solve the mystery of her aunt’s death. As if these weren’t enough problems for a teen vampire, she is inevitably stuck in a love triangle and must choose between Chase Tallman or Steve. (Not Steve the Pirate, alas.) This is the third and final book in the Shadow Falls trilogy.

TL;DR version of the review:

I didn’t leave this book unfinished because it was spectacularly bad like Ravished by the Triceratops; if it had been as bad as that gem, I would have devoured it – I love that level of so-bad-it’s good. This book was mediocre. I wanted to like this book, for the following reasons:

1. The heroine comes from a Chinese family, and that was refreshing given the lack of diversity in popular fantasy
2. I was intrigued by a world in which vampires can experience human phenomena like having periods and giving birth
3. I like vampire and werewolf stories
4. Some of my favorite books are YA even though I’m thirty-one years old.

I gave the book 20 chapters before I threw in the towel. (Full disclosure: I didn’t read the first two books in the series, and I don’t normally read straight romance novels.)

The writing felt stilted at times. For instance, there was a stretch where Della keeps saying “Dang!” Do teens really cuss like salty old prospectors? Is it actually verboten to say a proper “Damn” in a YA novel clearly aimed at teens? Also, reading phrases like “she smarted off” drove me nuts, because such phrases created the impression of visibly trying to sound hip while staying PG-13 at most. The chapter breaks in the middle of conversations – for no good reason – also irritated me.

The main characters didn’t hold my interest because they were as substantial as paper dolls most of the time. Granted, character development must have happened in the first two books, but it needs to continue through the series finale too. This brings me to the first of my two biggest problems with this book:

Chase Tallman. Is he really anything more than a thin copy of a young Eric Northman? (Tallman? Northman? SRSLY.) In the 20 chapters I read, I found little reason to find Chase compelling – his character boiled down to “I’m obsessed with Della (in kind of a creepy way) and I have Vague Career Aspirations in the supernatural investigative agencies. Also, I’m tall and handsome.” While reading about this character, I could never get over the fact that he had “bonded” with Della when she had no choice in the matter. (Eric Northman did something similar in the Sookie Stackhouse books.) That kind of forced emotional connection, and his apparent ability to see some of what was in Della’s mind, left me queasy.

My second biggest problem with this book: the least interesting story was the focus. The main focus is which hawt guy Della will end up with, and 90% of the book is devoted to Della angsting over which man. Admittedly, I am the sort of reader who prefers novels that give at least as much space to non-romantic plot threads as to the romantic threads. Even so, the sheer amount of angsting led to a slow-paced feeling throughout the chapters I read, and it shouldn’t take at least 20 chapters for a book’s action to begin in earnest. I felt like I was perpetually watching a rock begin to roll down a hill, without it ever gaining real momentum. Even the supposed action chapters I read felt drowned out by the “OMG, Chase is an asshole, but he’s so HAWT” musings.

This angsting really took away from Della’s interest value as a character. The best Della scenes did not involve Chase, and there were too few of those scenes. The scenes where she feels hurt over her father’s behavior come to mind as examples of moments where Della’s character felt most compelling. The writing in those scenes rang true emotionally, and I actually wanted to learn more about her family dynamics. (Writing this review makes me realize why I liked The Hunger Games and not Unspoken. Katniss Everdeen doesn’t spend 90% of the books angsting about Peeta and Gale.)

Finally, I had a repeat problem with thinking, “Wow, this side character or subplot sounds a lot more interesting than endless teen angsting!” as I read the 20 chapters. Burnett, who is basically Giles from Buffy the Vampire Slayer reborn, is married to a fairy and runs a camp/school for supernatural, angsty teens; that sounds like a more interesting story! (And what’s with camps for vamp and were teens? So Percy Jackson.) The story of Eddie, Della’s uncle, becoming a supernatural doctor and discovering the Reborn virus, which creates a special type of vampire? I’d love to read THAT story! I also repeatedly found myself thinking, as the backstory became clearer to me, that the first two books in the Shadow Falls trilogy must have been a lot more interesting than this final book. Unspoken felt little more than a conclusion to the romance plot, and it is not a well-written one at that.