Alice's Review: Existence by Abbie Glines

Released: 13th December 2011
eBook: 194 pages
Price: $4.99
Publisher: Wild Child Publishing
Source: Bought
Genre: YA, Romance, Paranormal
Series: Existence Trilogy
Series Order:
1. Existence
2. Predestined (4th April 2012)
Summary:  

What happens when you're stalked by Death? You fall in love with him, of course.

Pagan Moore doesn't cheat Death, but instead, falls in love with him.

Seventeen year old Pagan Moore has seen souls her entire life. Once she realised the strangers she often saw walking through walls were not visible to anyone else, she started ignoring them. If she didn't let them know she could see them, then they left her alone. Until she stepped out of her car the first day of school and saw an incredibly sexy guy lounging on a picnic table, watching her with an amused smirk on his face. Problem is, she knows he's dead.

Not only does he not go away when she ignores him, but he does something none of the others have ever done. He speaks. Pagan is fascinated by the soul. What she doesn't realise is that her appointed time to die is drawing near and the wickedly beautiful soul she is falling in love with is not a soul at all.

He is Death and he's about to break all the rules.

My Rating:

A BIG FAT ZERO

My Opinion:
The blurb of this book sounds awesome and once you get over the name 'Pagan' (really, what cruel mother would name her child Pagan? 'Paige' is way more suitable) it doesn't seem too bad at the beginning. But then everything goes downhill from there.

So Pagan and her (much more appropriately named) best friend Miranda are starting their junior or senior year at high school (I've honestly forgotten!) and they're wooing over a guy called Leif (which I pronounce 'Layf' not 'Leaf' because I read Deltora Quest in class when I was a little girl and Lief was called 'Layf', though now I realise they have different spellings). So Pagan walks into school and sees this hottie soul following her and - gasp - he speaks to her. She's appropriately surprised and tries to avoid him but eventually falls for him because he talks to her (they're very short conversations and there are only about six of them) and seems to care for her. All this time she has hooked up with Leif.

Then Pagan's soul appears at school and he is a kind-of-famous member of a band. His name? Dank Walker. You know, how you describe mouldy, wet places as 'dank'? Yeah... So before his appearance at her school, he prevents Pagan from dying (c'mon guys, we all know that Dank is Death, it's so obvious!) in a car accident and sings her to sleep every night in the hospital. During this time and their very brief and few chats (with him mostly appearing out of nowhere and scaring her) he and Pagan fall in love though Pagan continues stringing Leif on until who knows when because she doesn't break up with him in the end of the book, though she is about to.

So between Dank appearing at her school and the end of the book, Dank disappears because he and Pagan had a fight or something and erases everyone's memories of him (why?!?), Pagan is diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and is sent to a mental institution for young people when she is clearly SANE. And then she kind of but not really dies and comes back to life. So yeah. I wanted to put this down. A lot. About thirty pages in, when it started going bad. But I wanted to know what would happen in the end. Let me tell you: not worth it!

First off, what the hell is this author thinking? Why would she make Dank (I can't get over his name!) go to Pagan's school for a few months and then suddenly disapepar? What is the point of this? As well as him flirting with the slutty girl in her year? WHY? I don't understand. ._.

And why was Pagan sent to a mental institution? How could the docs not see how sane she was? Why would she string Leif along even when Dank is flirting with and almost kissing her every ten minutes? I just don't understand why most of these things happened. I was WTFing most of the way through.

The only redeemable character in this was Leif and he's revealed to be some supernatural creature at the end and is implied to be evil. I was sad because I like Leif. He was so sweet to Pagan when she was such a stupid brat. This novel has cemented how some characters in YA novels are stupid and useless. This is not a good example of a great YA novel and it makes me weep for all the fantastic ones out there.

My verdict: My dear subscribers/readers, please do not purchase this book because it makes barely any sense. The concepts of this book could have been so much better executed! But they weren't and I ended up wondering what the author was smoking whilst writing this.