The Revenant

Tommy seems a lot better today. Took a goodly amount of naps (didn't time them but I reckon about 1 hour and 45 minutes total, much more normal) and didn't seem to be in as much pain. I feel better too.

So the second book I read was a short one. Like 225 pages. I don't normally read ghost books. But I've had this one on the shelf for a long time and I felt ok with reading it now. It's The Revenant by Brana Lobel.

It is about a boyfriend/girlfriend who live together in an apartment building that used to be an old house where something bad happened long ago and has echoed through the years to haunt them. It starts as a scary story and ends scientifically. It almost felt like the author had left off at some point and someone else finished it for them. The scary parts are scary, of course, but the scientific ending kind of throws you and makes the rest of the book not so scary. Which can be good if you're like me and still get childish nightmares after ghost stories, lol.

Was it good? Yes and no. The main character is despicable and a horrible person. But the story draws you in and doesn't let you go. So if you can overlook the main character's flaws (flaws as a person that is, not flaws as a fictional character) it's very enjoyable. And I found it very easy to overlook her lifestyle because the story was so good.

One thing I found kind of funny that has nothing to do with the story or anything is that the previous owner of this book underlined various words that I guess they wanted to look up the meaning of someday. I knew some of them, which made me feel smart, but others I had to look up too. Also some of the page corners had been folded over to mark pages. OMG AUGH! *head-a-splode* Use a bookmark, people, come on! Don't ruin books just cause you're too lazy to find a marker. Even a torn off piece of an advertisement or junk mail will do! A business card! Square of toilet paper or piece of paper towel or napkin! Something, anything, just don't fold the corner of the page!

On to the semi-spoiler portion of this:

The scientific part is that it turns from being about ghosts haunting people to about time travel! Yes, that's right, the apartment is "haunted" because that area happens to have a time travel portal or whatever around it. But this is one of the stupid methods of time travel. See, the boyfriend goes back in time to save a woman who died in the past. However it was this woman's death that was such a big part of the time travel and haunting thing. Without her dying the book would not exist. There would be no conflict, no reason for the boyfriend to go into the past to save her because she would have already been saved. This is how my view of time travel is. Like Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban's time travel. However the time travel presented here is one used in other media. Another book I read explained it as each jump in time makes a new parallel universe. So this version isn't really bad so much as it makes no sense to me.

Another thing is I didn't see what connection the boyfriend and girlfriend really had with each other. I believe the hauntings made them think they loved each other more than they actually did. Which I guess isn't necessarily bad, I just wish someone in the book had said so.