Book Review: The Vision by Jen Nadol

 
The Vision by Jen Nadol

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

Publish Date: September 27, 2011

Hardcover, 240 pages 
Fiction, Young Adult, Paranormal
 ISBN: 978-1599905976
The Mark #2

My Review:
The Vision picks up a little ahead of where The Mark left off and I must admit that confused me at first.  I read so many books that I was trying to figure out how The Mark ended in the first place, but after a little bit I remembered and Jen Nadol does a great job of bringing you up to speed in the first few chapters.  I also think that with these first few chapters that a reader could pick up The Vision and start with it without reading The Mark. Yes you miss the back story, but it could be done.

So once I figured out where I was in the story, the story began to pick up fast from there.  With Cassie moving to a new town to try and figure out more about how the mark works, the reader finds a whole new cast of characters and a new love interest or two for Cassie.  I found the plot of the book to be very interesting.  Cassie is still trying to figure out whether telling a person and saving their life is a good thing or a bad thing.  She knows that there is a possibility that saving one persons life means that another person will lose their life.  What is the person's life she saves is not worth saving.  She wrestles with the meaning of each life and even tries to stay away from crowded places so she won't be confronted with the mark and have to deal with the what ifs.  She's come to the suburb of Chicago to seek out a Greek population like her to find out if there is anyone like her.

While wrestling with all of this, working at the funeral home, befriending Ryan, learning about various religions and trying to find a way into the Greek group, she meets Zander.  Zander is the hot guy and player at school.  Zander is the guy that Cassie's best friend Liv has warned her about.  But Zander has an interest in her.  Suddenly Cassie and Zander are together and Cassie finally feels she fits in, but does she.

Cassie is really developed in this book.  She wrestles with right and wrong through the whole book.  I like that although she is on her own, she is still very much a teenager and she acts like it when it comes to guys, she is still rather immature, still trying to figure things out when it comes to love.  The rest of the characters were rather glossed over.  I never felt like I got to know Zander.  I honestly liked him, then I hated him.  I never knew Ryan either or any of Cassie's friends.  Cassie is the star of the book, but it would have been nice to know one or two of the other characters a little better.

The Vision is a great book if based solely on plot - it moves along at a strong pace that really held my interest.  It furthered the premise put forth in The Mark and prepped me for the third book in the series The Touch.  I like the moral angle that Cassie dealt with when trying to decide whether to tell and how she knew this was too much of a job for just one person.  Where The Vision fell just a little flat for me was with the characters.  While Cassie's character was strong and well fleshed out, all of the others were not and that made them hard to understand.  However this did not detract from the overall enjoyment of the book.  I still enjoyed the book very much and with the ending I will be anxiously awaiting The Touch.

My Rating: 3.75/5.0


About the Book:
Cassie Renfield knows the mark tells her when someone is going to die and that she can intervene and attempt to change fate. But she still doesn't understand the consequences, especially whether saving one life dooms another. With no family left to offer guidance, Cassie goes in search of others like her. But when she meets Demetria, a troubled girl who seems to have the power of the Fates, Cassie finds the truth isn't at all what she expected. And then there's her heady new romance with bad boy Zander. Dating him has much graver repercussions than she could ever have imagined, forcing Cassie to make choices that cut to the essence of who she is and what she believes.


About the Author (from Goodreads): 
I grew up in Reading, PA, hometown of John Updike, Taylor Swift and fellow YA author A.S. King (nope, didn't know any of them).

I went to college at American University in Washington DC, graduated with a BA in Literature, then spent the next twelve years doing something totally unrelated to pay the bills.

Now I live north of NYC in an old farmhouse with my husband and three young sons. I am thrilled to finally be writing, the thing I always meant to do. 

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FTC Information: I received this book from Teen Book Scene for an honest review.