Velveteen - Daniel Marks

Publication Details:

Published by Delacorte Press on 9th October 2012

447 pages

27 chapters

Synopsis

Velveteen Monroe is dead. At 16, she was kidnapped and murdered by a madman named Bonesaw. But that’s not the problem.

The problem is she landed in purgatory. And while it’s not a fiery inferno, it’s certainly no heaven. It’s gray, ashen, and crumbling more and more by the day, and everyone has a job to do. Which doesn’t leave Velveteen much time to do anything about what’s really on her mind.

Bonesaw.

Velveteen aches to deliver the bloody punishment her killer deserves. And she’s figured out just how to do it. She’ll haunt him for the rest of his days. 

It’ll be brutal... and awesome.

But crossing the divide between the living and the dead has devastating consequences. Velveteen’s obsessive haunting cracks the foundations of purgatory and jeopardizes her very soul. A risk she’s willing to take—except fate has just given her reason to stick around: an unreasonably hot and completely off-limits coworker.

Velveteen can’t help herself when it comes to breaking rules... or getting revenge. And she just might be angry enough to take everyone down with her.

Review

So I've decided to insert the synopsis in this review, as you can see above, because I don't want to spoil anything about the storyline by trying to explain it myself. So now I can go on to talk about characters and the writing style and my overall thoughts without spoiling the storyline for anyone. 

The main character that I'll talk about is Velveteen Monroe - more commonly known as Velvet in the book. I liked Velvet's character overall, she was badass and strong. I loved how determined she was to get revenge at Bonesaw for killing her as horribly as he did. As much as I loved Velvet's character, there were a couple of moments where I thought she was showing examples of her being self-absorbed which I really disliked, I just felt like it didn't suit her character very much and kind of put me off her a little bit, but luckily she made up for it with her badass-ery.

Nick Russell is the other character I'm going to talk about - Velvet's romantic interest in the novel. I really liked Nick's character, I thought he was cool and he didn't really think too much of himself, apart from when it came to him trying to seduce Velvet, which was just hilarious to me. It was interesting to see Nick coming into Purgatory and having to come to terms with being dead. Again, I really enjoyed reading about Nick, he's just one of those characters that you love and love to read. He was funny, quirky and just an all-round awesome character.

I feel like I have a slight love/hate relationship with Daniel's writing style in this book, especially in the first half-ish of the book. There was a lot of description and little dialogue in the first half of the book but the dialogue gradually increased as the book went on which I'm very grateful for. I suppose with world building like this, a lot of description is required but I'm just not the super descriptive fan that some people may be and I'd have liked the dialogue to be more common in the beginning. Aside from the description overload, Daniel's writing style was very captivating and interesting.

I ended up loving this book, the action type scenes were awesome, the whole world that Daniel created was incredibly and imaginative. Something else that stood out to me was the funny parts of the book, I wasn't going into this book expecting it to be funny so when characters had these awesome comebacks and funny lines, I cracked up. And the funny parts weren't very frequent or crammed together, so when they came along, they were that much funnier. This is a stand alone novel as far as I know, but I definitely felt like Daniel has written it so that should he ever want to return to this world and write a sequel, he's left it open so that he could do it with ease. I'd definitely read the sequel if Daniel did decide to write one, but if he didn't, I'd be pretty satisfied with the action and all that good stuff that was in this book.

5 out of 5 stars!