Review: Hunter Green
Author: Brianna Stoddard
No of Pages: 161
Release Date: 4 November 2010
HUNTER GREEN will blow you away! It is an amazing story that will show you the world in a whole new light! It is focused on an incredible teenage girl, named Emily, who sadly loses her mother from a menacing, evil werewolf. Emily vows revenge and begins hunting the creatures down. She gets help from Isabella, a kind Psychic Gypsy that knows how to help her become the ultimate hunter. Emily realizes her destiny and becomes a killing machine. She starts her journey across the world and leaves no werewolf's blood un-spilled in this wonderfully dark and bloody story.
Warning: This review will contain spoilers because the absurdity of it cannot be fully appreciated without them.
My Thoughts:
This has to be the most self-serving, poorly researched story I have ever read.
Emily has lost both of her parents, her father left when she was young and her mother was murdered by a werewolf.
Emily is probably the most annoying, yet voiceless character I have ever read. The writing was so poor that Emily doesn’t even register to me as the voice of this novel, we attempt to view the story through her eyes, through her selfish, childish ways but she’s nothing but a fluff character.
What I hated most about this book, and it was definitely hate not just extreme dislike, was the complete lack of research and the obvious laziness when it came to actually writing the story. It reads like it was written by a twelve year old and I actually did check that out half way through to make sure that it was actually written by an adult.
First off we have the completely believable scenario of Emily, a fifteen year old girl who has just lost the last of her family to a werewolf swearing vengeance on all who turn furry at the full moon. Okay.
So off she goes into the wild, with nothing in her pockets but her mother’s credit cards, a little bit of cash and her supplies. May I just add in here that she decided to wear high heeled boots for this journey – yep, that’s practical. Oh and it seems that credit card security no longer matters, because that wouldn’t suit the authors purposes, so Emily was able to use all of her mother’s credit cards, and draw down on the cash without having to show ID.
Isabella the gypsy-psychic - witch (because all gypsies are witches, didn’t you know?) takes her in because she has foreseen Emily saving the world. Not so unbelievable. But then we get to the part that really cheeses me off.
Isabella the gypsy-psychic-witch decides to do a tarot card reading – I am a card reader and like everything else, I don’t mind people using it, I don’t mind people making fun of it, but if you are going to reference it, research it first. The “spread” she did raised my eyebrows as it was, but then, apparently there is now a card called “the baby cradle”, are you kidding me? Do you think we are that stupid? Not to mention Isabella’s “spells” which were conveniently named to suit Emily’s purposes such as “To gain the speed of a cheetah” and “To become immortal”, very creative.
Then there was the solid silver and gold sword, yep, I like science too, so I will also point out that that is impossible, as the sword would be too soft, not to mention because of Emily’s wonderful awesomeness she only had to practice for a few weeks (instead of the decades it takes normal people) to master that and all of her other weapons. And these were only a few of the problems in the first thirty five pages.
Then we (
finally) move on to some killing and hunting. There are hundreds of thousands of werewolves all over the world, they keep breeding and biting people to make new ones but of course Emily’s an ambitious girl, and vows to kill them all, she is so wonderfully fantastic that she never gets a scratch on her, or hurt in any way, she manages to kill dozens of werewolves at a time. And even manages to kill eight werewolves in five minutes. This is where the details could have been really juicy - as the synopsis promises - but we didn’t get anything, the writing literally went “After the next full moon I had finished searching the whole country and had killed a total of three hundred werewolves”. That is how the story continued from then on unless, of course, we had to hear in explicit detail exactly what she was wearing that day or how many outfits she bought in various colours during her travels.
I only finished this book out of obligation because it was a review book, and for the small hope that maybe, just maybe Emily died, or turned into a werewolf. But no this book was full of hate for weres who encompassed everything evil. There were no exceptions, it was quite racist actually, female weres were evil, males weres were evil, baby weres were evil, didn’t matter the age, the story, the circumstances, they were all evil.
But of course Emily managed to kill them all, within two years and with only two trips around the world, she becomes a hero because naturally everyone wanted to kill a species that they knew nothing about, everyone loved Emily. She even managed to get a bloke, and it only took a single meeting a poorly written clichéd paragraph at the end of the novel. “We had loved each other from the very first sight of each other. We were destined to be together.”
Not to mention all the other discrepancies, scattered throughout the novel. But honestly if I keep going, this review will be longer than the novel was itself. It was poorly written, poorly executed and based upon a very poor idea. There is a saying in the writing world, if you can pitch a book well, it is usually horrible, this book is pitched nicely enough, I was excited to read it, and then I turned the first page.
Hunter Green was a horrible waste of time. I feel sorry for my eyes, sorry for my PDF reader and sorry for anyone else who has the displeasure of reading it. One is the lowest rating I give, but it doesn't even deserve that.
