Review: Captivate Me by S.J. Pierce

Book: Captivate Me (Captivated #1)
Author: S.J. Pierce
Published: January 9, 2014
Number of Pages: 281
Format: Ebook (.mobi)
Source: Received from Xpresso Book Tours in exchange for an honest review
Rating: 3 Stars
Tags: YA, Pissed, Blog Tour, Received for Review

Goodreads/Amazon 

Synopsis: Seventeen-year-old Kat Walsh is a Gifted - a human with paranormal abilities. With her mom a former Angel and her dad a dream prophet, it's always been in her genetic make-up to be extraordinary. Unfortunately for her, the world can't handle the strange or unusual. So when she slips up and uses her powers at her high school in Ireland, the entire student body treats her like a freak - even the ones she thought were her closest friends.

Broken, but hopeful for a fresh start, she allows her parents to enroll her in a boarding school buried deep within the forests of a small Colorado town. At Midland Pines, School for the Gifted, she feels as though she can finally be herself; she makes new friends and even has the attention of the most popular guy in school - Levi. Everything feels normal again... or does it?

Not long after her arrival, weird dreams of an alluring boy whom she's never met surface during the night, and the eerie, shadowy trees encircling their school seem to call to her. As these disturbing, yet enticing developments intensify, other bizarre occurrences happen - students and staff turn up missing, and mystery visitors leave gifts while she sleeps. With all of these other things vying for her attention, a desperate Levi has to fight even harder to keep her interest. But with the dreams of the attractive boy slowly captivating her heart, Kat has to make a choice - will she settle for 'great' Levi, or will she search for her elusive dream visitor, possibly stumbling across 'amazing?'

my review

“One breath. One simple, precious breath. It’s something you don’t think about until there’s a possibility that there might not be another.”

I can deal with a lot of YA tropes that most book lovers can’t. And I think that I’m really understanding of book ideas and the author’s ideas, so I don’t really mind love triangles, lost royalty, and other tropes like that. There are two though that I can’t stand; when characters fall in love with their stalkers, and insta-love.

In this book we follow Kat through her first few weeks of senior year at a school for the gifted. There she figures out a lot of stuff about her family, her gifts, and her choice in men.

I’m going to rant about what I didn’t like first. Imagine having to eat seven packets of unseasoned crackers, no seasoning (not even salt), and no drink. It would be really bland right? Bland just like the characters. There was nothing to them! They were just, there. Nothing really special about them.

Imagine that you attend a boarding school. You wake up, and there’s a flower on your bed. You first are confused, you think that maybe think that your boyfriend put it there. You ask him and he didn’t. You ask your friends, they didn’t put it there. What do you do? Call the police? Tell the school? Believe that it’s just a coincidence? Do you believe that it’s the guy you dreamt about and fall in love with him without even seeing him? There are a lot of different answers, but you do not instantly fall in love with the man who thought it would be fun to randomly put a flower on your bed. He could have kill you! Or raped you! You’ve known him for a couple hours, YOUR NOT IN LOVE WITH HIM.

I got excited when Kat learns that ‘you know whats’ could only be killed by having their hearts removed or their heads cut off. That was a big “YES! KILL EVERYONE,” moment for me. Because there just wasn’t much going on. I was surprised that ‘you know who’ and ‘you know who’ were ‘you know whats,’ mainly because I was so distracted yelling at Kat because YOU CANNOT BE IN LOVE, YOU’VE KNOWN HIM FOR TWO DAYS, so it was a pleasant surprise. Though I wish that there was more death.

That being said, this book did keep me entertained. I was pacing, cussing, and lecturing the characters in this book, so it did keep me entertained. Maybe not in the best way, but it still got the job done.

So overall this is most likely a setup book for the next book in the series. The characters weren’t great, and the romance was horrible. I already have the second book, so I will probably end up reading it when I don’t have another book to read (which will most likely never happen). But knowing me, I’ll probably give it a try before the end of 2016.