Well, I finished it, but I can't say she won me over.
I think maybe there were just too many 'central' characters in it for her to be able to do justice to any of them really, so they ended up being pretty two dimensional and a lot of them bordering on stereotypes. I kept feeling like I wanted to know more about a character and how they got to be who they were and she just kept failing to deliver with any of them, which stopped me being able to feel much for them except maybe some annoyance and mild irritation! ;) The only character I did feel any involvement with and empathy for was Krystal, but I still felt she could have been developed more too.
Perhaps the luxury of being able to develop characters over a series before, makes it harder to do that in a single novel - I feel similarly about the writing in the early books in the Harry Potter series, to me it always feels like the first three books could have been written by a different author almost to the last four. The book and the characters just felt rushed to me.
I'm probably just overly pedantic, but something that bugs me when reading is when authors haven't researched minor facts properly. For me, if you are going to make something believable, then it all has to be believable, including the little things, otherwise they just bring the bigger things down. In this case it was the Sukhvinder/Fats storyline - Sukhvinder is supposedly tech savvy enough to be able to hack the council website, but is incapable of setting her privacy settings on facebook to 'friends only' so that Fats can't keep posting stuff on her wall!? hmmm....
The ending I thought was fairly predictable. I couldn't have told you who was going to be involved, but it was obvious that something sad and tragic was going to be used to round it all off.
I don't think I'll be bothering to read anything else she brings out. :meh:
