The biggest problem with this book was that I honestly couldn't have cared less. About anyone. Or anything. Oh, the other problem was that everything was sexualized, but remember...I don't care.

*SPOILERS AHEAD* (You know, if you CARE about that sort of thing)

*DNFd at 100 pages*

Now I've never read Rebecca, or seen an adaptation, but I do know a tiny itty bit from SRB's parody of it, which is 9856% better than this. However...

This was just plain bad. Our main character, Tess, is vapid and about as deep as your average kiddie pool. Her main, and apparently only, concern is Max and how much she wants to be with him, because he's...hot? She'd be fabulous with him and help him to "move on" past Becca, never really minding the fact that he appears to actually be torn up about her death and is seriously mourning her. Tess doesn't seem to actually care about Max as a person but only as someone that could be with her. Also, she's sorta creepy and stalkerish. And obsessive. *shudder*

Devon is...well, frankly, not someone I would ever want as a roommate or, to be honest, an acquaintance, really. 

Max is boring. I know he's mourning Becca and stuff but...eh. I couldn't really care about him as a character. Not that I really cared about any of these people as characters.

Franklin wins any positive awards to be presented to this book, and even he wasn't that great. 

Rebecca's so-called "hauntings" thus far were completely underwhelming.

And the writing is nothing to write home about either.

Big fat pass.

*Keep in mind that I did only read the first 100 pages, so if Franklin plays a bigger role or Tess progresses to the deep end or Becca starts actually being a scary ghost or you know, anything like that, I wouldn't know.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's gripping psychological drama...

You see, books tend to lose their "grip" on their readers when character deaths are drawn out for nearly 20 pages, or whole chapters are devoted to describing a garden or Phoebe's bedroom or the sunshine or the cent-shop. So essentially, the reader has very little hope of ever being "gripped" in the first place, considering that a rather large portion of the first (lengthy) chapter is devoted to describing the House, which as we all know, is the real main character of this book.

But Hawthorne does rock the descriptive narratives.


On a completely unrelated note, there was one paragraph that just...ew. Seriously. I did NOT need to know what Clifford "noticed" about Phoebe. Nope.

I may have abhorred the main characters, and that ending, but I actually enjoyed reading it the last 150 pages. Of course most of that time was spent trying to hide myself under the blankets without suffocating.

Now if only I could recall where I put my notes on this....

I'm a bit on the fence about this one. On the one side, there's great world-building, with appendixes and maps and monsters and wicked-cool occupations with some amazing thought put into it. On the other side, there's about the blandest characters I've ever seen. Potential is definitely there but it's not quite showing its colours yet. Europe is probably my favorite character, simply because she's kinda a badass, but even she needed more. And backstory, oh my gosh!

So it was actually a bit of a chore to get through. I didn't really care one way or another about Rossamünd and it was slow-moving to boot. But I had to finish it and once I settled in, it started moving along a little quicker. Or at least it seemed that way.

Here's to hoping the characters live up to their amazing world in the rest of the series!