Review: Freeks by Amanda Hocking

Title: Freeks
Author: Amanda Hocking
Series: Stand-alone
Genre: YA/Mystery/Urban Fantasy/Romance
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Publication Date: (Expected) January 3rd, 2017
Edition: Kindle Edition, 400 pages
Source: NetGalley
Purchase: Amazon US | Kobo | Barnes and Noble | Book Depository | iBooks | B.A.M.

Synopsis:

     Welcome to Gideon Davorin’s Traveling Sideshow, where necromancy, magical visions, and pyrokinesis are more than just part of the act…

     Mara has always longed for a normal life in a normal town where no one has the ability to levitate or predict the future. Instead, she roams from place to place, cleaning the tiger cage while her friends perform supernatural feats every night.

     When the struggling sideshow is miraculously offered the money they need if they set up camp in Caudry, Louisiana, Mara meets local-boy Gabe…and a normal life has never been more appealing.

     But before long, performers begin disappearing and bodies are found mauled by an invisible beast. Mara realizes that there’s a sinister presence lurking in the town with its sights set on getting rid of the sideshow freeks. In order to unravel the truth before the attacker kills everyone Mara holds dear, she has seven days to take control of a power she didn’t know she was capable of—one that could change her future forever.

Review:

This was a very interesting book. It started off in a way that made me wonder if I was actually going to like this book or not, but it turned out to be a pretty great book.

The characters are really well written. I would have liked to get to know some of the characters better, there are a lot of characters that I would've liked to have more page time than they got, but they were more side characters and the story wasn't really about them. It was about Mara, and her discovering who she is and what she wants from life.

The romance kind of came along really quick and almost felt like instalove. It also took too much of a front seat of the book for me, I was more interested in the carnival itself, and the people in that group than I was in Mara and Gabe's romance.

The mystery of who or what was attacking the carnival was the best part of the book, and like I mentioned, I wish it was a slightly larger part of the book. I was both surprised and expected what could be considered the twist to happen.

I also really liked that it was set in the 80's. Even if part of the reason why it worked the way it did was because Cell phones didn't really exist back then, and it would have caused plot holes if the book was set during a time when Cell phones were widely used. But it painted an interesting setting.

This was an uncorrected proof, so things that I read are subject to change, though I didn't really detect any writing "errors", I just would have preferred the book focus more on the carnival folks more than the romance.