Book Description

Katie is plagued with visions she can’t understand. It’s not until she enters the spirit realm to find her missing dad that the pieces start to fall into place. A reaping of souls has begun and Semonic, the ruler of Dylonia, won’t stop until every soul belongs to the darkness. Katie must decide whether her soul can accept her destiny. But only the Destiny Maker knows if she will lose her life and possibly her heart.

My Review

I received a free copy of Destiny Maker by Melissa Dugger in exchange for my honest review from BookLook Blogger. Destiny Maker was published by West Bow Press.

The beginning of this book definitely caught my attention and made me want to keep reading, but honestly, after a while, the story seemed repetitive and seemed to drag. Katie travels to another country, alone, to try and save her father, just after her high school graduation, without her mother’s knowledge. She has never been to the country, where her father has gone missing, before.

Ms. Duggar attempted to create a world where evil and the dark spirits are holding souls as well as humans in either their power or what seems to be a state of limbo. Though there are some hints at Christianity, I felt that it was much more of a  tribal voodoo type religious realm. Even Katie does not convince me that she has a strong faith in God, which makes me wonder how she could possibly defeat the forces of evil.

Then there is a teen love triangle thrown into the mix, but one of the characters involved is conveniently removed.

When I began reading this book, I had no idea that it is supposed to be the first book in a three book series, so imagine my surprise when the ending comes quite abruptly with nothing resolved and none of the real action having taken place. Therefore I was quite disappointed with the ending because I felt like nothing really happened in the entire thirty-one chapters. The author spent entirely too much time working on the romance and there was very little action. A plan to fight the evil/dark spirits was constantly talked about and there were several times that the fact that they were running out of time was mentioned, but nothing ever really happened.

I believe the author could have completed the story in one, maybe two books, if she had included the action in the story. There were also quite a few spelling and grammatical errors throughout the book and the author changed point of view back and forth between two, sometimes three, characters from paragraph to the next, which caused me to have to reread a paragraph now and then to figure out whose head I was in.

I doubt that I will read the rest of this series if it comes out. I tried to find information or a blog or something by or about Melissa Dugger and her progress on the series, but was unable to find anything, and the fact that this book has been sitting on the West Bow Press BookLook Blogger Book Review list for so long makes me wonder if this series will ever be finished.

I think that Ms. Dugger has a good idea with this story and she has done a good job in creating her main characters. I just didn’t think the pace of the story was fast enough or that there was enough action.