Rally the Readers: Ten

Ten
By Gretchen McNeil
Publisher: Balzer + Bray

To Sum It Up:

When best friends Meg and Minnie are invited to an exclusive party on Henry Island, they jump at the chance to go on the weekend getaway. Without telling anyone about their whereabouts, they reach the party, but the hostess is nowhere to be found. The raging storm outside is attributed as the cause. But the party must go on, and it does—until the partygoers start showing up dead. Meg realizes that they are getting picked off one by one, and she's figured out that one of them is the killer. With no way to send for help and no way off the secluded island, all the teenagers can do is survive until morning.

Review:

I was beside myself when I found Ten lurking in my mailbox. Eagerly, I sat down and started reading. The book started off okay, but several chapters in, I was rolling my eyes, snickering, and leaving the book unread and desolate on my nightstand. It took me an eternity to finish the book, and it took me even longer to review it. I wanted to like the book and be kind, but I just couldn't do it.

Ten, being a horror book, was lacking a great deal in the horror department. I read the book in solitude at night and I still wasn't scared. I could have been camping on an island while reading and still have been perfectly at ease. I'll admit that the book was kind of creepy, but that's about it. I was confused, though. For a book written under the genre to scare people, I was a little more than disappointed—my bravery knows no bounds.

Everything about the book was so typical it hurt. Several teenagers are stuck on an island with a psycho killer on the loose! Oh, but there's a twist—the killer is one of them! Been there, done that—several times, actually. I was quite bored with the triteness and predictability of the plot. I started counting how many times I rolled my eyes. This book bothered me so much because I really did want to like it! The odds were not in Ten's favor.

The characters in the book annoyed me to no end. You have Meg, with her co-dependent, depressed bestie, Minnie, and her angsty ex-boyfriend, T.J. That's about all of the characters I can remember. There were more than several secondary characters, but I gave up on remembering them, seeing as most of them died. The book was cluttered with names, and, I'm sorry, but it's terrible that a character's sole purpose is to kick it. I tried to like Meg, I really did, but she was just so annoying. She kept trying to please her friend Minnie, who I have come to resent, and barely tried to figure out what was going on. I'll admit that Meg and T.J. were the most sensible of the characters, but their “I like you, but I hate you” relationship distracted me from rooting them on to survive. The baddie, who isn't revealed until the very end, is the most interesting out of the lot.

I will admit that the ending caught me off guard—just by the slightest. That's what saved the book for me. I had everything fairly figured out; the little twist, however, sent me back to the drawing board. I found my balance quite quickly after the bump, but the bump was enough to make me rethink the book. Yeah, most of my time was spent yelling at Meg to open her eyes and dig a little deeper, but at least I was involved in the book. Unbeknownst to me, I was all caught up in the action, and that's all anybody can ask for in a book—an escape.