Graveyard Shift - Angela Roquet

Lana Harvey is a reaper, and a lousy one at that. She resides in Limbo City, the modern capital of the collective afterlives, where she likes to stick it to the man (the legendary Grim Reaper himself) by harvesting the bare minimum of souls required of her. She’d much rather be hanging out with Gabriel, her favorite archangel, at Purgatory Lounge. But when a shocking promotion falls in her lap, Lana learns something that could unravel the very fabric of Eternity. If the job isn’t completed, there could be some real hell to pay.

Blurb taken from Goodreads.

*

At the start of October, I was seriously feeling the Halloween vibes, and was looking for some spooky reads for the month! One of the books that I had on my kindle from a couple of years ago was this; Graveyard Shift by Angela Roquet. It sounded intriguing and definitely in keeping with 'Spooktober'!

I started reading and was immediately struck by how overwhelming and confusing the story was. There was definitely a very detailed and fleshed out world, but it was far too chaotic to be enjoyable. I also found the main character to be cynical to the point of irritating, and I'm not sure the interesting side characters and stories did much to help.

It's such a shame, but I don't think the story was carried off well.

Rating: ✫✫

 The Story

Graveyard Shift features a world that is so detailed, so thought out and so unique that I have to commend it. As soon as I started reading, I was surprised by just how much brainpower must have gone into putting it together in a way that made sense. The sheer amount of detail was extraordinary, but I don't think it helped the book at all in this case. I kept waiting for the moment when it all started to be less confusing, but that point never came. And that began to make me want to skim read rather than read through carefully, which isn't where you want to be with a book.

And for all this detail - the story never actually went anywhere! I made it through the whole story and it felt like very little had actually happened. I understand that this is the first book in a series, but you normally find that even so, something happened to progress the plot. The things that did happen just didn't feel important, and so I got absolutely no satisfaction from finishing the book.

On top of that, I felt that the main character, Lana, became increasingly insufferable as the story went on. She is immediately introduced to us as cynical, which isn't necessarily a problem. Some of our favourite protagonists are moody or cynical; Katniss Everdeen and Rose Hathaway spring to mind. However, the character does then have to have some redeeming qualities, and Lana just didn't. The longer the story went on, the less time I had for her defeatism and selfishness. It's not the kind of quality I can relate to in a heroine.

The Verdict

All in all, I just think the execution of this book was disappointing. The idea was pretty awesome, and certainly unique, but it wasn't carried off well. The world was overcomplicated whilst the story was bordering on dull. Some of the characters were fun and cool, but the heroine was just really annoying and it did put me off the book even further.

I hate seeing books that have such potential fall flat, but sadly, this one did.