Good, Bad, and Ugly Books

Something Like Fate Review

Book Review #23: Something Like Fate by Susane Colasanti

Overall Rating: 3/10

Plot: 3/10

Characters: 3/10

Writing: 4/10

Sample Passage: The bond that Erin and I have was supposed to mean that we’d always be friends forever. That nothing could ever come between us.  Now I’m wondering if our bond is strong enough. Maybe we’ve grown apart so much that the accident doesn’t matter anymore. Maybe the rest of what we have together isn’t enough. I’m not sure it our friendship is strong enough to survive into next year when we’re away at college. But.  We know each other in a way that no on else can. We share a history that makes us permanently connected. So I have hope for us.  All I can do is hope.

Number of Pages: 268 | Paperback Edition
Published: 2010 by Viking, a member of Penguin Group Inc.

Summary: Lani is a believer of fate.  She believes that the stars and your sign, and your horoscope affect your path. It has been accurate so far, in her mind. But she becomes very unsure of her fate when her best friend Erin, with whom she is tied together for life by fate, starts to date Jason, the guy that could possibly be her soulmate. And she thinks he feels the same way. When Erin goes off to camp, leaving Jason and Lani alone, Lani finds herself with the hardest decision of her life. Fate? Or her best friend?

As I’m sure you could tell from that summary, this plot seems pretty darn cliche. And it IS pretty darn cliche. It’s exactly what the summary makes it seem like, which isn’t true for all books. I believe that you can’t judge a book by its front or back cover. Although with this book, eh, I’m going to go ahead and say you can. 

I really did not like this book. The plot, aside from being cliche, was poorly planned out and written. Most of the time when I read a romance novel of this type, there are many other little plots within that plot that helps define the character at the end. Well, this only had about 2 plots. Jason. And Blake, who is gay but is hiding it. And the only one that really captivated me was the second one. Unfortunately, that was only 20% of the book.

It did get better in the second half. The first half is all about Lani making the decision of whether to date Jason or not.  That’s about it.  All we hear is “I think he’s my soulmate, you’re not supposed to keep soulmates apart” immediately followed by a “But this is wrong, I shouldn’t be doing this.” That may be good for, you know, 10 pages or so but I don’t think it’s good for 100! 

The characters are mostly really annoying. Lani is a huge believer in fate, which I don’t believe in, so I found it very annoying and hard to relate too. Jason is okay, but you can’t really tell what he’s feeling except for the fact he loves Lani very much. If I had to compare him to a character in another book I would compare him to Ky in Crossed, for those of you who have read that. And that is not a good thing. Erin is totally not nice at all, completely self-centered in my opinion. The only character I really like is Blake. Despite his situation (his dad always says really mean things to him) he seems really happy and strong.

The writing in this book was very dry.  It’s hard to tell if the writing’s good when you have such a bad plot. On the plus side, I understood everything that was happening at all times. On the minus side, if there is such a thing, I thought that sometimes the author would add unnecessary things in there and would tend to ramble.

Overall, this is not the book that I would recommend reading. I thought it was cliche, shallow, dry, and completely not worth my time.

Coming up next: The Maze Runner by James Dashner and Silent to the Bone by E.L. Konigsburg