Inspired by the Pages of Bookish Love meme created by Ashley at The Bookish Brunette and Alexa at Pages of Forbidden Love, She Said/She Said is a new feature hosted by Barbara at Basia’s Bookshelf and Nick at Nick’s Book Blog, where we’ll choose books and review them on each other’s blogs.

Hi guys! If you’ve ever hopped over to Nick’s to read her reviews, you’ll probably have noticed we’re sort of…freakishly like-minded when it comes to books. She’s got great taste in books, she’s brilliant and she just happens to be an awesome person so it followed that we had to have some fun picking books out at random to see what we thought. Crux was my pick this month. Next month, I’m letting Nick pick because I obviously have no idea what I’m doing. If you’re interested in hearing my thoughts, head over to Nick’s after you read her review to read mine!

By Julie Reece

Publisher: J. Taylor Publishing
Publication Date: July 9, 2012
Genre: New Adult/YA-Mature Fantasy
Source: Purchased

She should have run. Now, she’ll have to fight.

Eighteen year old Birdie may be homeless, but she’s surviving, that is until a mysterious guy throws money in the air like a crazy game show host, and she grabs some with the idea she’ll be able to buy dinner that night.

In that singular moment, unassuming Birdie becomes the girl in everyone’s viewfinder. Thugs want to kill her. Money-guy wants to recruit her. The very hot, very rich, and very out of her league Grey Mathews wants to save her.

Birdie, though, wants nothing to do with any of them, until she realizes fate didn’t bring them all together.

Her heritage did.

Now, with only twenty-one days left, she’s got to decide whether to follow in the footsteps of those before her or risk her life for people she’s only just met.

Goodreads Summary

Finding new and unique YA paranormal books can be really hard these days since most books seem to have the same elements in them. When I read the summary of Crux, I thought it sounded quite original and I was pretty excited to dip into its awesomeness. While the book had the possibility to be something exceptional, I felt a little let down by it.

Crux tells the story of a homeless girl, Rebecca, who calls herself Birdie. When a mystery man begins to throw heaps of money, she, along with other homeless people, doesn’t even hesitate to grab the maximum they can. What Birdie doesn’t expect is a group of thugs following her around. While trying to hide from these very thugs, she meets Grey Mathews. Soon after, she realizes that she’s not ordinary girl at all and along with Grey she will have to fight for good.

I think my biggest problem with Crux was the poor characterization. Sure, the main character, Birdie (By the way, that name really annoyed me. I kept picturing a bird over and over again.), was depicted as someone strong, courageous and kick-ass. At times, she could even be quite fun to read about with her sarcasm and humor. However, I never formed any sort of emotional connection with her. To me, she was only a name on paper. For me to really enjoy a book, I need to feel alongside the characters. Birdie’s emotions were never so palpable that they touched me. I had pretty much the same feelings for her love interest, Grey. Unlike Birdie, I didn’t think he was hot or swoon-worthy. In fact, I thought he was quite monotonous. To be honest, all the characters had a similar effect on me. They lacked substance and depth to make them very interesting.

I thought the plot had the potential to be very entertaining. However, Crux failed to impress me and make me fall in love with its storyline. The book started splendidly with an explosive scene that immediately grabbed my attention and pulled me in. That beginning scene was the only one scene where I can say I loved where the story was headed. After that, it went pretty much down-hill. I felt that some of the scenes were completely unnecessary and a waste of space. Moreover, the plot just stood at a standstill and not much happened throughout the book. I expected tons of action judging from the cover, but I wasn’t satisfied at all. Even the background story surrounding Birdie’s lineage wasn’t well crafted, according to me. Also, the romance didn’t appeal to me because of I didn’t feel much chemistry between the two characters.

As you can tell, I wasn’t very invested in this book. Most of the time I was bored, but I continued reading it because this was the second book Barbara and I chose that we didn’t love for our new feature. We couldn’t switch books over and over again, so we decided to keep reading it. I’ve seen a lot of positive reviews for this book and the GR rating is quite high (above 4.0), so maybe, you readers might actually enjoy it although I didn’t. Crux was probably not a book written for me.

Rating:
Cover: 3/5
Plot: 2/5
Characters: 2/5
Writing: 3/5

Actual Rating: 2.5/5