Effortlessly Reading

My Rating: 1.0 When I hear the words The Carrier of the Mark, the next thing I immediately think of is Twilight. I thought people were exaggerating about how alike The Carrier of the Mark is compared to Twilight, but sadly, I have to apologize to them. After I read The Carrier of the Mark myself, I realized that I had underestimated how similar the two books are. (Please note that I read Twilight more than five years ago, and if I can recognize tons of similarities between these two books, then that's definitely bad news.) I'm not even going to list all the similarities between The Carrier of the Mark and Twilight since there are probably tons of other reviews out there that have already done that and there's nothing new I can add to that already long list. My first day at a new school...again. (ARC 5) The Carrier of the Mark could have been good, despite it's strong similarities to Twilight. I mean, take Obsidian by Jennifer L. Armentrout for an example. Obsidian is very similar to Twilight too, but the way Jennifer L. Armentrout wrote it made it actually enjoyable to read and stand out from all the other Twilight-like books. The Carrier of the Mark could have been like that, but sadly, it wasn't. In my opinion, the worse part of The Carrier of the Mark is that just like Twilight, Carrier of the Mark has - you guessed it! - instalove! After knowing each other for less than a week, Megan and Adam can't live without one another and would sacrifice everything just to be near each other. It was highly unrealistic and totally Twilight-like. "Adam DeRis, the guy down the back. Don't look now, but he's staring at you."I felt red heat climb slowly up my neck, stinging as it passed over my scar. I ached to turn and look. (ARC 10) Another thing that grated on my nerves was the fact that in most of the dialogue, the characters say each other's name all the time when they're talking to one another as if the author was worried that we would forget their names. We readers are not slow, we can keep track of who's who and who is speaking when. We don't need constant reminders like, "But, Adam...!" and "This will solve nothing, Megan." Not to mention, there were also tons of info-dumping in The Carrier of the Mark...all done in the dialogue. To test this, I flip to a random page and bam! I see a huge paragraph...that is a long dialogue of Adam explaining something to the others. I honestly don't think that I've ever read a book that info-dumped using dialogue before. "So the elements were maintained, but in order to perform elemental alignment, the Order needed four elements fully evoked at the same time. The strength required of the four elements to connect and balance Earth is substantial..." (ARC 148) The only one redeeming (if you can even call it redeeming) thing about Carrier of the Mark is that the book is set in Ireland. That's it. Leigh Fallon inserted a bit of Irish culture into the book, and it was fun to read about that. As I was reading The Carrier of the Mark, I really wanted to DNF it, but since I received it for review from ARCycling, I rather not because they deserve a full, proper review. I can't promise that I didn't skim most parts though, but hey, I tried. Overall, I definitely would not be checking out the sequel to The Carrier of the Mark, Shadow of the Mark. Hopefully Shadow of the Mark would have nothing in common with New Moon or any of the other Twilight books. Effortlessly Reading: Carrier of the Mark