Author: Meg Cabot
Series: The Abandon Trilogy (Book 1)
Publisher: Point (Scholastic, Inc.)
ISBN: 9780545284103
Pages: 304
Buy it: Amazon Barnes & Noble
The plot according to the book jacket:
Pierce knows what it's like to die, because she's done it before. Though she tries returning to the life she knew before the accident, Pierce can't help but feel at once a part of this world, and apart from it. Yet she's never alone...because someone is always watching her. Escape from the realm of the dead is impossible when someone there wants you back.
But now she's moved to a new town. Maybe at her new school, she can start fresh. Maybe she can stop feeling so afraid.
Only she can't. Because even here, he finds her. That's how desperately he wants her back. She knows he's no guardian angel, and his dark world isn't exactly heaven, yet she can't stay away...especially since he always appears when she least expects it, but exactly when she needs him the most.
But if she lets herself fall any further, she may just find herself back in the one place she most fears: The Underworld.
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I love mythology, so I was pretty jazzed to learn that Meg Cabot's latest book and latest series would focus on one of my favorites: the myth of Persephone. A lot of authors these days are publishing re-imaginings of fairy tales, so this is a little different in that it focuses on a myth.
Pierce is living a pretty normal life until she slips into a pool and drowns. While she's dead to the world, in reality she's entered the Underworld and has caught the attention of John Hayden. John is a very mysterious figure to Pierce, who hasn't put it together quite yet that she's dead. John decides to save Pierce from the Furies and tries to keep her safe in his home. Not fully understanding the situation she's in, Pierce decides to escape from John and the Underworld, and returns from the dead.
After her life-altering experiences, Pierce's family falls apart and her parents divorce. Pierce and her mother move to Isla Huesos, FL to live near her mother's family. Pierce's rich father is none too happy about this since he more or less forbid his ex-wife to visit her family during their marriage. Pierce had only met her mother's family once, at her grandfather's funeral when she was a young girl. Coincidently, she also met John for the first time at the cemetery, only she doesn't realize it until much later.
Pierce is a sympathetic narrator. You feel her confusion at the situation she finds herself in. She just wants people to quit focusing on the back from the dead thing. She's trying very hard to get her life back to some kind of normal. Her confusion about her feelings towards John, who always shows up whenever she's in danger or angry, rings true. She doesn't know if she can trust him because she doesn't really know who he is. John is a mysterious guy that Ms. Cabot is very slowly unraveling, at least in this book. I really hope she goes into John's background a bit more in the next book.
While the book itself is not perfect, it is a good start to the series. I, personally, would've loved to see this book contain a lot more than 304 pages. There is so much ground to cover that it feels like the novel is over right as it's getting started. You find out something very important about a relative of Pierce's and then boom, the book is over. Hopefully the second book in the series, Underworld, is a little bit more fleshed out than Abandon was.
I recommend the book to readers who enjoy Ms. Cabot's other novels, enjoy mythology and are looking for a good light read for the summer months.
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