Hold Me Closer, Necromancer

Great book. Made me laugh and made me cry

I wanted to like this book. I really, really tried. But there is so much happening both in the plot as well as in the writing that I couldn't get past. To start, the book felt very cliché, from the characters to the incessant sarcastic one liners. There was very little character depth or development, as everyone's voice read the same. The plot bounces so much, and the author tries to immerse the reader in the world without much explanation, which I actually prefer, but McBride's writing is so vague and shallow that it seems to leave TOO much to the imagination. At one point, there was a tailed, named character in the scene and I had no idea if it was a talking cat or dog, or a werewolf, or if the villain was just having a psychotic episode and imagining things. There was so much I wanted to explore, but I couldn't go a paragraph without getting slapped with another 'joke', and the characters were so flat, when the main protag DOES have a valid emotional outburst, it's hard to sympathize with him because he just seems like a brat. When the main protag meets the only (alive) girl in the plot, I dipped out of there fast and tossed the book in my donate pile; I couldn't afford to cringe more than I suffered through within the two pages I had read after they met. It's obvious this is a YA novel, but being a YA novel doesn't excuse weak characterization and plot.