Review for "Wayfarer" by Alexandra Bracken

What was history anyway but the lies of a winning few? Why was it worth protecting, when it forgot the starving child under siege, the slave woman on her deathbed, the man lost at sea? 


 

 Rating:★☆☆☆☆

This book... where do I even begin? How about with the simplest thing... This book is boring. It does not excite the reader. I was not drawn into the characters or the plotline, much like the first book. The book was 532 pages, but I don't even remember most of the plotline because that's how unmemorable it was. For a second there in the middle, I thought I would end up giving this 3 stars because I was intrigued at certain points, but by the halfway point I was just dragging my feet to finish this. So what went wrong?

There are so many characters, and none of them are written well. There are also characters just thrown into the mix, to be abandoned and then returned to at the end of the book. If this was supposed to be a twist, it's honestly just corny. Speaking of corniness... this whole book is a melodramatic cringe. There are too many quotes about destiny and love that just made me want to stick a fork in an electrical socket. Here's a quote from the final battle:

...when the Shadow stabbed at his heart, the bead caught the tip of the blade.

Awww the earring necklace that Etta gave to Nicholas as a token of her undying love saved him from dying, awwww. NOT. First of all, that just makes no sense. A SWORD was stopped by a... BEAD? Come on. And even if it did make sense, that's the cheesiest plot point I've ever heard.

We've covered characters and writing, and this segues me into the last flaw of the book: the plot itself. I mentioned that it's boring, but also it just doesn't make sense. There are so many plot holes with the time travel plot because it isn't well established in the beginning, and it makes the whole thing implausible. The author tries to make predetermined destinies coexist with free will, and by definition these two things cannot coexist. It just does not make sense. I was also confused by parts, I didn't understand what was going on with Li Min, or Rose's Grand Plan. Things were not explained well. It was incredibly frustrating.

There were also just some parts of the plot that made me laugh at how ridiculous and unnecessary they were. For example: the Shadows and the Ancient One. There was already enough going on with the Ironwoods, Lindens, and Hemlocks, why add in some scary spooky Shadow dudes just for the heck of it? If the author really wanted to add another competing group, why not add the Jacarandas, who were consistently mentioned but never actually showed up in the story? The Ancient One is, perhaps, the biggest plot letdown of this novel. I actually snorted at the part where Etta literally THROWS A TORCH at him, and he burns up like tissue paper. Like what??? This dude is the most powerful traveler, and everyone is afraid of him, and he has an army, and he's going to Thanos everyone out of existence, but he gets taken down by little more than a lit match? I think that is the epitome of the lack of logic in this book.

My overall series rating: 1.5 stars. Obviously, I didn't like it. It was kind of a waste of my time, and I do not recommend this time travel story. I do plan on reading The Darkest Minds (also by Alexandra Bracken) in the future, so fingers crossed that I like that one better!