Review: The Blessed by Tonya Hurley

Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Series: The Blessed #1

Pages: 416

Received: Received an extra copy from a friend

Release Date: September 25, 2012
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Goodreads Synopsis:

From the author of the New York Times bestselling ghostgirl series, the start to a captivating and haunting teen trilogy about three girls who become entangled with an enigmatic boy—a boy who believes he is a saint. What if martyrs and saints lived among us? And what if you were told you were one of them?

Meet Agnes, Cecilia, and Lucy. Three lost girls, each searching for something. But what they find is Beyond Belief.

My Review:

I feel like this book had a lot of promise to it from what I was told about it. This is one of those books that the cover really tricked me, it's so creepy and I thought this was going to be an interesting and skin crawling type of book. In the end I was quite disappointed in this as a beginning to a new series. The book opens up with three completely different girls who have never met ending up in the hospital for different reasons. Each of their lives are changed by one boy following that night.

The big thing throughout this story is faith and having the girls find something to believe in. I just found that there wasn't a lot of growth in then girls throughout this novel (I do believe that will happen in the upcoming books of this series). I found that for that I couldn't really connect with any of the girls. I just found each of them impersonal in their own ways, I'm not really sure how to describe it but they each had issues that were over dramatized in my opinion.

The story as a whole was very confusing. I couldn't figure out what was going on throughout a lot of the book. After the girls meet, they separate and the story jumps between each of the three girls and I couldn't really figure out what was happening with them. A lot of information came up out of the blue that confused me with the psychiatrist and Sebastian's past, there were brief mentions but I didn't feel as if I was given enough of the history.

This was a book that was also very highly filled with religious themes, but that part did not bother me. Hurley did a good job at not being pushy with a book that is about three saints. In the end I was just too confused and sadly I don't see myself continuing with this series because this book just wasn't very gripping. I hope that the series does get better and will explain more but I am just not interested enough.