Shadows - Amy Meredith

A Dark Touch Novel: Shadows is the debut novel by Amy Meredith. It was released on 1st April 2010 by Red Fox and it is 240 pages long.

Plot

Fifteen year old Eve Evergold comes from a wealthy family and lives in a small town in the Hamptons called Deepdene. After spending the summer in Hawaii, she’s about the start high school. After a whole summer away, Eve is informed of the two new guys at school and they’re both totally hot.

Eve and best friend Jess are lucky enough to run into both of the new boys before school starts but things don’t go quite as planned with either. Luke is cute, blonde and a preacher’s son but he thinks Eve is spoilt. Mal is dark, mysterious and brooding but barely says a word to Eve. It seems like she cant win with either guy.

Strange things are happening in Deepdene that are ruining Eve and Jess’ social life. Someone close to Eve is a demon and loads of people she knows are going insane. It seems like Eve’s newfound superpowers are the only thing that may be able to stop the demon.

What I thought
Eve and Jess were everything that I hated about female characters. Both were spoiled and full of themselves and knew that having money could get them whatever they wanted. As soon as I realised what kind of girls they were, there was an instant dislike and I’m afraid that I really didn’t warm up to them. They just seemed so shallow for the most part that I couldn’t find much about them that I did like. Eve has her moments of being stronger than I had expected but it doesn’t last very long and only in a couple of different parts. Jess wasn’t so bad though and was a good best friend for Eve but it was a shame that she didn’t have a bigger part in the story.

I think the biggest problem for me was that the book was so short. Maybe if it had been longer it would have given me more of a chance to get to know Eve and Jess and see a different side to them. If I could have managed to see beyond their shallowness then I have a feeling that I would have enjoyed this book a lot more.

Amy Meredith tried to throw in some interesting twists into the plot to keep the story exciting and unpredictable but I unfortunately saw through them all. I did like the way that she tried to throw the reader off the right track but it was just a bit too transparent. I guessed who the demon was pretty early on due to some things just not adding up about the character in question.

The supernatural aspects of the book were a very interesting idea with a good background explaining some of the reasons why they were happening. I wish that the supernatural aspects of the story had been strong enough to overpower the weak characters because they were all I was paying attention to most of the time. I just didn’t care what Eve was capable of and what would happen to her in the end.

As you can see, there were very few things that I liked about this book and I can only be thankful that it wasn’t expensive. I do feel quite sad that this is the first book to go into Hell! There are going to be at least two more books in this series but I definitely wont be buying them.