Saturday, October 12, 2013

Review: Found by Stacey Wallace Benefiel @NetGalley


Found by Stacey Wallace Benefiel
Series: Penny Black #1
Publication date: February 24th, 2013
Pages: 159

Synopsis:
Discover what happened to Zellie, Avery, Melody, and Ben!

And meet Penny Black, a girl with a past that can see the future.

Penny Black hasn't had it easy. Just about everything you'd expect to happen to a harassed foster-kid turned junkie has happened to Penny. Add in the mysterious power to rewind time, conducting events around her, and it's a wonder she held up on the streets for so many years. Now, at seventeen, the New Society has found her. Finally, Penny is where she belongs. But that doesn't stop the visions, or the need to protect the victims shown to her.

Wyatt Adams is excited and intrigued when his sister Melody assigns him to be Penny's Lookout. Being the youngest, and hopelessly ordinary in the family that created the New Society, has left Wyatt feeling like he has a lot to prove--and Penny is a big deal. She's got abilities that surpass any he's seen before... and pretty much every quality he looks for in a girlfriend, but no one needs to know about that, especially Penny.


Available at:


Review:
I received an e-copy of this book from the publishers at NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This is yet another book that I read that seems to be a spin-off of another series. I found out the book I recently read Bad Kitty was also a spin-off of another trilogy. Found seems to be a spin-off of the Zellie Wells trilogy. As much as that causes the perfectionist in my to scream in agony, I still decided to read the book and see what I thought of it in the end. I hoped that the fact that it was set in an already established futuristic world wouldn't cause any problems for me.

Penny is a street urchin of a girl. She has been running from unknown forces since she was a young girl. After witnessing her parents' deaths and being placed into abusive foster homes, she had no choice but to try to make it on the streets. What she didn't count on was having an odd ability that causes her to "dream" tragic occurrences and then "sleepwalk" into rewinding them so the events never happened. This strange talent has the unfortunate drawback of causing her to pass out at random places leaving her vulnerable to animals and bad people in a weakened state.

It is only after Penny comes face-to-face with the leaders of New Society that she is transported into a world of teenagers with talents very similar to her own. In this world she meets her new Lookout (essentially powerless sidekick), Wyatt, who she is instantly attracted to. Wyatt is determined to be the best Lookout Penny could ask for. He is determined to prove himself to his family of powerful individuals. Both Penny and Wyatt have motivation to prove themselves and a hunger for acceptance.

I could not nail down how I felt about this book. One minute something would happen and I would be completely enamored with the world I was being introduced to and the next I would be rolling my eyes and checking the percentage on my Kindle Fire to see how much more I had to suffer through.

One thing I liked was the uniqueness of the world. Sure, we have read or see movies about time travelers and people who could move through time, but this was a big different since it was essentially a complete society of these types of people and not just random mutants.

One thing I did not dig about Found was the use of some of the slang. Maybe it's something that was established in the foundation series (this is why reading a spin-off is sometimes detrimental to the reader), but I just found it annoying. I could understand if they used "bueno" or "chido" in character speech, but it was also being used when the characters were NOT talking. That irked me a bit. Especially since both of those words are Spanish and the main characters are, as far as I know, Caucasian. Odd.

Basically... this book was all over the place for me.

I will say this...

Found is a book that lovers of such movies as X-Men and Jumper will find to be literary gold.