Moonstone by Marilee Brothers

A sickly mom. A tiny house trailer. High school bullies and snarky drama queens. Bad-guy dudes with charming smiles. Allie has problems. And then there's that whole thing about fulfilling a magical prophecy and saving the world from evil. Geez. Welcome to the sad, funny, sometimes-scary world of fifteen-year-old Allie Emerson, who's struggling to keep her and her mom's act together in the small-town world of Peacock Flats, Washington. An electrical zap from a TV antenna sets off Allie's weird psychic powers. The next thing she knows she's being visited by a hippy-dippy guardian angel, and then her mysterious neighbor, the town "witch," gives her an incredible moonstone pendant that has powers only a good-hearted "Star Seeker" is meant to command. "Who, me?" is Allie's first reaction. But as sinister events begin to unfold, Allie realizes she's got a destiny to live up to. If she can just survive everyday life, in the meantime.



I got given the series to review. I read the first book.

I got a couple of pages in before I realised this wasn't the book for me but I kept on going.
Kept on going to the very end.

The reason I didn't enjoy the book so much wasn't so much the plot-line but the writing style and characters. The main character, Allie, really annoyed me; like really, really annoyed me. It is always frustrating when you don't like the main character of a book in first person but to be honest, I didn't really like any of the characters to much. Cory was a wimp, Manny and Mercedes were plain and Junior was predictable. Bad-guy-is-actually-good-but-got-mixed-up-with-bad-people? An overplayed cliché in half of the YA books you pick up. Faye, Allie's mum, was a terrible mum. You don't just decide you don't want to do anything any more so fake an illness to get benefits. It's wrong.

The author used caps lock - a pet peeve of mine - and Allie's thoughts were generally... annoying. This book didn't quite get into my good books. It was a quite a quick read - a fact I'm glad about - and left a lot of strings hanging. I could go onto read the rest of the books, but I read the first couple of chapters of the second and the first few pages of the fourth and the writing style is still much the same.

Though it was quite a predictable book, the plot was fine in my books. Kind of. Maybe. I don't know. I don't know how much I can say without going all spoiler alert. Maybe I should just give one.

Spoiler Alert!


When she thought Junior was a Trimark (basically somebody who has lines the shape of a triangle on the palm of their hands), I think he should have turned out to be the bad guy. Well maybe not him, but one Cory Philpott should have. Actually it would have best if it was Manny or Mercedes - now that would have been an awesome plot twist.

End Spoiler Alert!

I'm not saying this book is bad, just not in my favourites pile. I'd definitely recommend this book for fantasy lovers (or anybody who doesn't hate fantasy) as long as you're not as fussy as me.
Which is quite hard to be. I am very fussy.

I'd give this book two out of five stars.

Giving books two and three stars is common for me. Though the book I'm currently reading will most definitely not get that. I can't post the review for a while because it doesn't come out until my birthday.