Review Detail

I didn’t know anything about Abandon when I first picked it up, but when I learned that it was a retelling of Hades and Persephone, I got really excited. I loved Everneath, another book based on this myth, so I had high hopes for this one. Unfortunately, I was quite disappointed by it. Pierce died when she was 15, and was brought back, but not before entering the Underworld. John, a death deity, that she had met as a child, wants to keep her there with him, but she escapes. Now, two years later she’s back to where it all started. The Furies are after her, and John wants to bring her back with him in order to protect her. Pierce just wants to make a new start and get on with her life.

Abandon has a very narrow time span. The first 100 pages all take place on one day. No, I’m not joking. This works for some books, but not for this one, since nothing happens. It was one very long, uneventful day. Well, there are some flashbacks, but still, a third of the book happens on the same day. I was super confused almost the whole time. I just did not get what was going on, and felt that the story was very strange. Why does Pierce keep apologizing to John? Why is John so pissed off? How did she get away from him the day she died? What’s the deal with the necklace? What are these “incidents” that John keeps saving her from? I felt like I was jumping into the middle of the series despite this being the first book!

I just have to wonder, why doesn’t Abandon start with Pierce’s accident, or even the events that led to her getting kicked out of school? There’s more than enough flashbacks that the author could have rearranged the chapters a bit and given us the story in chronological order. I normally don’t mind flashbacks, but there’s so many of them, and they’re mostly full chapters. Nearly the entire middle third is made up of flashbacks. It made the story feel disjointed and added to my confusion about the plot. Even by page 260ish, I still had no clue what the plot was. But it was also only the second day of the story. Another long, uneventful day. Things did start to pick up around that point though, thankfully.

Abandon was a weird one for me. Nothing happens at all for over 200 pages, and then everything just kind of happens all at once in the last few pages. I liked the twist on the mythology, but the plot was super boring, if you can even call two days of nothing a plot. I am curious about what the Underworld will bring for Pierce though.