The Glimpse

Okay people!Review time! *DRUMROLL*

*Ahem*(clears throat)Okay,NOW I'm good to go.

OH...MY...GOD. o.O
This was so not what I was expecting.This book went waaay beyond my expectations.I bought this book 'cause I got really good responses from my peers about it.And NO,for those who are wondering,I did not request for an ARC from Netgalley.I saw it on the YA book section of kinokuniya and dived straight for it,since it was the last copy they had and I didn't want someone else to get their hands on it.I got weird looks from the employees but at that point,it probably didn't matter.Now if you read a lot of YA novels like Yours Truly,and have read the blurb,I'm sure that you won't be seeing anything special in the book.But let me tell you one thing.THIS BLURB WAS CREATED TO MAKE YOU LOOK DUMB.The same goes with the first eighty-nine pages of the book.From there,it just starts getting awesome-er and awesom-er and leaves you with a "I did not see that comin'" type of ending.Honestly,if it weren't for those first EIGHTY NINE pages then I'd have given this book five stars without blinking.Honestly,for a second there,I felt that I humiliated myself in front of all those people for nothing.But don't back out.If those eighty-nine pages start bothering you,just skim through them until you reach the action-packed part.Believe me,your patience will be totally worth it! XD

Well, I just totally wasted a few hours of my life reading this one! Glimpse may seem promising and different, a dystopian world based on mental illnesses, but I felt like I had a freaking mental illness while reading this because I didn’t understand a thing! Where is this story going?! What the hell is actually happening?! Those are questions you’ll never get the answer to. I honestly feel as though the author simply picked a whole bunch of words and threw it at these pages, bounded it together, and then called it a book. I mean, it’s a mess!

I couldn’t connect with any of the characters, none of them adding anything to the story. The story started off on this one train of thought and then it seemed to just explode into a bunch of other ramblings and story lines that were just jumbled together and you had just try your best to make sense of it all. Just when you think you’ve figured out what’s going on, the author goes off on some tangent and you’re left wondering if it was even relevant to the story. Even the guys didn’t do it for me! Ana was just whiney and clueless, there was way too much inner monologuing, and nothing exciting happens throughout the whole story.

Damn myself for being unable to NOT finish a book, because I really wanted to quit this one. At first, I read about a quarter of the way through and it still didn’t capture me and I really wanted to let this one go, but I’m a sucker for finishing books, even if I don’t like them. But it took me a long time to even want to give this one another try after trying to avoid it for so long. It was just staring at me on my kindle, begging me to finish it, and I truly had to force myself to go there again. After finishing it, I wish I hadn’t even started it because it was such a waste of time, it’s unbelievable! I could go on, but let me try to forget this truly confusing and pointless story and move on.

Unsurprisingly, I was really looking forward to The Glimpse, because of that magic word dystopia, and because I seriously love the cover. It's both simple and fantastic, even if it does seem much more suited to the plot line of Delirium. My hopes definitely went down as I saw some reviews rolling into the blogosphere. None of the reviews I saw were overly positive, and I was pretty bummed. Still, I determined to read it myself, because I do try to read all of the dystopias.

Anyway, I actually liked The Glimpse, although I can see why it might have given other readers some trouble. What pulled me through the book was definitely the concept, which was something pretty new to me on the dystopian front, always a plus. In this future, the world has been divided up into the haves and the have-nots, only the dividing line is not race or wealth or attractiveness: it's sanity.

Society is divided up into Pures, those without any genetic markers indicating a disorder (ex. depression, bipolar, ADHD, etc.) and Crazies. The Pures live within beautiful communities and have pretty much everything they need. Their society isn't much different from ours, although they now get married through an antiquated process called Joining.

I found the whole division based on mental stability entirely fascinating. Imaginging society spazzing out about the ever-increasing number of people suffering from some sort of mental disorder is not really a stretch at all. That could definitely be something that a despotic government might want to control. Basically, this could be a way of helping Darwinism along by trying to get the healthiest people to stick together and procreate.

Though I really liked that, the characters never really felt real to me at all. I wasn't especially invested in them. I wanted to know what happened, but I didn't particularly care whether the main couple made it work or if they won out against the bad guys. They weren't terrible characters. Really, on paper, I should have liked Ana, but...meh. Whereas in a lot of books, the dialog is what makes the book move along for me, in this one it was definitely the longer paragraphs of description here.

Perhaps what distanced me from the characters was due to some weakness in the plotting. I often felt like the characters, mostly Ana, made completely illogical decisions. Not in a real life, people do stupid things kind of way, but in a wtf just happened kind of way. Ana would think things over and decide that the obvious choice in some situation was X, and I would be sitting there going, "Why would you ever do that in response to this situation? FACEPALM."

To sum up, the world building was really cool, but I thought everything else could use some more work. Despite thebook's limitations, I do think I will probably be reading the sequel. This one definitely isn't for everyone, but, if you like the premise, you may want to give it a go.