The Unsacred Gift

C.S. Dorsey

Welcome to IO Book Tour’s stop for ‘The Unsacred Gift’.

Have you ever had a dream that came to life? How about losing the one you love and  not being able to save them? What about a gift that you were cursed with? Well image having all three like Sicily “Sissy” Monroe.

“Some might say what I have is a gift. I say, I want to return it.” Sissy declares.

 Sicily “Sissy” Monroe has all the qualities of a perfect young lady. She is almost where she wants to be in life. But lying deep in the pupil of her eyes hold something that she cannot get rid of which interferes with her plans. She fights everyday with no one but herself. After having her first vision at age six of her sister’s (Misty) disappearance and the dreams of failing to save her, Sissy wants no part in another person’s fate. For years Sissy tried hard to avoid contact with people because she feared foreseeing their death. In keeping with this, she tries to stay away from her family. Little did Sissy know she could not run from her past, or her gift. She hopes someone will put her out of her misery, but she will soon discover that her visions and dreams were just a mere image of herself.

I was unable to write a positive review for this novel, and so my review was taken down until the tour is over. My apologies to regular readers. Here it is:

My initial impression of this novel was not positive. I felt confused by the somewhat repetitive beginning, and the kindle format was poorly laid out with the page numbers interspersed in the text. As this is an ARC I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but it still put me off.

The style of writing seemed very stilted in the first couple of chapters but I held out hoping that there would be an improvement. ‘I was frozen. It was like my body was numb.’ Then some more meaningless clichés. There is so much telling instead of showing, something that really irks me. Sissy talks about greens having a bitter aftertaste. It’s such an unecessary detail. In a more skilled author, those beans might be a metaphor for something else – not here, they just detract from the story.

There was a sudden time jump with no preparation, for a minute I didn’t know what I was reading about. This was 10% of the way into the book. The weird sentences at the beginning of the chapters didn’t do anything for my enjoyment either. I just couldn’t get over how awkward all the text was, particularly the dialogue. There were also some random changes in tenses.

Heaven and Halo for cousins and Sissy and Misty as sisters? Those names are not believable! The twins are the spawn of Satan?? Demonic ways? The tantrum Sissy describes sounds like typical badly behaved children – not demon-possessed.

Sissy’s mother is the most beautiful woman on earth? Also questionable. Sissy says she needs her mom, yet she has barely talked to her mom since she left for college, and her mother getting married is going to destroy what they have – when Sissy hasn’t visited for ages, and she constantly lies to her mother about her feelings?

The overtones of God-talk put me off. Maybe it isn’t something big to other readers, but it certainly didn’t work for me. If Sissy’s God was so good to her, why did she have this ‘gift’? The God talk, including mentions of such things as Sissy’s mother kissing in the dark being a bad and disgusting thing, is just unrealistic and threw me out of the narrative.

Some people see horrific things in their work all the time, not the occasional visions that Sissy has. Emergency room doctors, paramedics. Sometimes it seems like just because Sissy is a sissy she can’t stomach anything. Other things I found that didn’t work for me were the statements about how Sissy’s father will forever be a butt to her and the piranha fish eating the cat that was dumb enough to fall into the fishbowl.

Don’t even let me get started on the ending. I felt so frustrated after reading this book, and I literally felt like I had wasted 3 hours of my life. It’s hard to believe that such an interesting synopsis (which caused me to volunteer for this tour) could fall so short.

I appreciate the fact that it is difficult to write a book, believe me I do, but this book was crap. I think it was even worse than Twice Shy, which I didn’t enjoy either. It would suit an uncritical teenage audience, if anyone.

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