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At the Edge

At the Edge (Psychic Triplet Trilogy, #1) - Cait London

This would get negative stars if I could manage it.

Second time I've tried a book by this author, made myself finish this one and now I'm sorry I bothered. Total waste of time. No redeeming qualities.

This is what drove me crazy about this book.  The bold emphasis mine.

Then Claire, the intuitive, the empath, the most vulnerable.


“Be careful, Claire. I feel it stirring. I would stop it if I knew how. Protect yourself and stay away from large bodies of water. You’re most vulnerable there.”


They were in contact now, reassuring each other, the elder sisters checking on Claire, an empath and the most vulnerable.

 Can you say 'vulnerable' one more time? I think I missed the point of that paragraph, were you implying she's .....vulnerable?

That isn't bits taken out of context from separate parts of the story, that's the whole awkward passage as it reads on the page. And if that were the only time it would be fine. But she pulls the same stunt all through the book. Every possible bit of information is repeated over and over and over sometimes within a paragraph or a sentence of the last time you were told that particular bit of info. It's the same with the dialog, it seems like the characters spend most of the book rehashing the same things when they talk. You'd think it would be frustrating for the characters, having the same conversation a dozen times. It was certainly frustrating to read. I'm not stupid. I don't need to hear something a dozen times before I understand it, but this author seems to like to beat you to death with everything.

Almost as bad was the fact that none of the characters had any consistency. Claire refuses to help Neil find out what happened to his son, for perfectly valid reasons, like that she's inexperienced and her mother who has found lost/abducted kids before would be a better choice. Not to mention the whole danger to her sanity part of using her powers. But he insists on the fairly flimsy justification of "But I only trust yooouuu!" and she immediately caves and then is suddenly obsessed with finding the kid and all her reasonable objections are just gone.
And Neil is the same way, he wants her to help then instantly starts arguing with how she tries to do so (because he knows best when it comes to how to be a psychic, obviously) and undermining her efforts at every opportunity.
And that's the pattern for everyone in this, they say one thing "go over and make friends with your new neighbor, Claire", "He's your protector stick close to him", "Stay out of his problems it's dangerous, and you're vulnerable" and then flip and say the opposite without any reason for the reversals. And they go back and forth again and again throughout the book.

And the rest of it with the brother and the evil force was just boring. Actually, it was all boring. There is never any sense that Claire is in danger, even when she is attacked by a man intending to murder her, afterward she hardly reacts and seems to shrug it off within a chapter or so, and if she doesn't seem to feel threatened I don't see how a reader is supposed to believe the stakes are very high at all.

And ... god the more I think about this the more I remember that I didn't like. The psychic powers thing just seemed weirdly structured, like it lacked internal consistency, it didn't hang together right. The idea that trauma could make a psychic more vulnerable to the risks of their powers is fine I can go with that and even that after such an event their powers could be stronger, developing more in order to deal with that trauma. But for Claire the three traumas were...

1.)  Being kidnapped as a child along with her sisters and experimented on for two days, an event that still causes her nightmare and anxieties.

2.)  Walking into a bank robbery and then suffering a miscarriage due to her empathic powers going into overdrive, another event that left lasting scars she was still trying to overcome.

3.)  And then the attempted assault which she barely turned a hair over and seemed to dismiss with little trouble. And yet it was causing the same "my powers are getting more powerful" reaction. One of these things is not like the others.

(show spoiler)



Ugh, I really didn't like this book. And the more I write the more irritated I get with myself for wasting time finishing this book when I could have been reading anything else. Cereal boxes, VCR instruction manuals, something.