Review: Resonance by Erica O’Rourke

What: Resonance (Dissonance #2) by Erica O’Rourke

Who: Simon & Schuster Books For Young Readers

When: July 21st 2015

How: A copy of this novel was provided by Simon & Schuster for review via Edelweisss.

As a Walker between worlds, Del is responsible for the love of her life—and the fate of millions—in this thrilling sequel to Dissonance.

Del risked everything to save Simon, and now he’s gone, off in another world with no way for Del to find him.

She’s back at the Consort—training to be a Walker like everyone in her family. But the Free Walkers have other plans for her. This rebel group is trying to convince Del that the Consort is evil, and that her parents are unwittingly helping the Consort kill millions of people. The Free Walkers make Del the ultimate promise: if Del joins their fight, she will be reunited with Simon.

In agreeing, Del might be endangering her family. But if she doesn’t, innocent people will die, and Simon will be lost to her forever. The fate of the multiverse depends on her choice…

Oh boy. OH. BOY.

If you remember (or not, that’s okay too), I loved Dissonance. I loved the multiverse theory that it presented, and the unique way the love interest was presented and the fact that it wasn’t the #1 priority of this book. I don’t know if I mentioned it in my review, but I also really liked the pace. I was never bored.

Let’s just say that everything changed in Resonance. The multiverse theory took a back seat. That’s not to say that it doesn’t take a central role in the book, because it does, but there weren’t as many cool times in the multiverse. It was more about how it operates, and how that operation can be improved. Which was, to say the least, a little bit boring.

This book is pretty long, and it only has two objectives. TWO. For 450 pages. That’s approximately 225 pages for each objective. No wonder I was bored out of my brain.

The romance becomes one of the two objectives of this book. Del is grieving over Simon until she realises that Simon isn’t, in fact, lost or dead but alive and healthy. Quite a bit of this novel is her making a deal with the Free Walkers to see him again, because they saved him at the last minute when all the shit went down at the end of Dissonance.

The second objective is to challenge the Consort, and how they cleave all the multiverses to give energy back to the original (our) world. This happens very slowly, with a lot of talking about it and realising how they’ve been killing these echoes of people and blah blah blah. I couldn’t believe how boring it was.

Del becomes a case of the special snowflake syndrome in Resonance, which disappointed me. I find it incredibly unrealistic when teenagers continuously play the role of saviour and hero in society when they haven’t even graduated high school. That’s not to say that teenagers don’t have potential, but I really don’t believe they’d play a huge role in a revolution if one came around. They’re still kids, no matter what they think. So when Del is doing all this super special and dangerous stuff I was a little exhausted by it.

I also felt like the ending was the epitome of anti-climactic. Absolutely nothing is resolved, and Del decides to do this thing that is in no way her decision, and the whole shebang just had me rolling my eyes. It felt like a cop-out of an ending, to be honest, and I felt like nothing had been achieved in the 450 pages that I had read except for a few minor details.

Overall, I was very disappointed in Resonance, because I had been looking forward to it so much after loving Dissonance. This is the second time the final book in a duology has let me down, so I’m starting to think they might not be for me.

© 2015, Chiara @ Books for a Delicate Eternity. All rights reserved.