DNF Review: Rebel Belle by Rachel Hawkins

This book was making its way around Youtube a year or two ago and it seemed like so much fun. It was branded as Buffy the Vampire Slayer set in the American South with all that that entails of cotillion and manners and lemonade. 

It does have slight Buffy vibes as the main character, Harper, is a high school girl who must step up to the task of protecting, not the world, but one particular person. But that’s about it, as far as the Buffy comparison goes. 

Harper is a regular, albeit slightly high-strung, girl who on prom night ends up in a magical fight between the janitor and her history teacher. As it turns out the janitor transfers some powers to her, and her history teacher then tries to kill her. Harper decides that she must be going crazy, but while she is figuring out how exactly, she finds out that indeed she is not crazy, but some seriously weird stuff is going on. 

I gave this book just over 150 pages before I decided to DNF it. The story seemed a little flimsy to me with very convenient magic happening and epiphanies based on two pictures in books picked at random. Then I have a very big pet peeve when it comes to consistency, and this book was all over the place with that. I was sort of into the story, or at least willing to give it more of a chance and keep reading, until I read these last few pages where a person was laying on the floor, then sitting, then suddenly still laying there, then standing, then sitting in a chair, then apparently still standing, then sitting down still, then standing and sitting in another chair altogether. Just in a few pages. These kinds of mistakes just makes it seem like the books either have really careless editors or have no editors whatsoever and that just makes me feel like, if the book wasn’t worth spending time crafting for the publishers, why should I spend my time reading it?

So I gave it up then and there and I’ll be moving on to hopefully more carefully crafted books.