Review: Haunted by Joy Preble

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"Anne Michaelson "is trying to forget everything that happened last year. But it's hard to do when her heart aches for Ethan "and there's a wild-haired woman stalking her...""Ethan Kosinsky "is embracing his newfound mortality. But something is drawing him back to the girl he left behind-"back to Anne and back to the magic..."
A mysterious stranger is hunting Anne wherever she goes. No one sees her but Anne. When she searches for the woman's identity, Anne exposes secrets about her own life- things that will change her life forever. And when the gorgeous Ethan returns, her life gets a lot more complicated.
Anne thought her journey with the Romanov family had ended, "but it was just the beginning..."

Haunted - the sequel to Dreaming Anastasia.  After Dreaming Anastasia, I was quite interested in reading it.  When I did, I was disappointed.  I just couldn't get into it until the near-end when it was a bit more exciting.  The plot was relatively plain, especially for a sequel.  It felt a bit pushed, like Preble had to put in some extras at the end.  I didn't think there could possibly be a sequel by the end of Dreaming Anastasia, and it was not even hinted at the end, but there is.  I was already satisfied with 'happily ever after, the end' and so Haunted felt slightly pointless.

In Haunted, we take a good look at the relationships between the characters.  Romance blooms and wilts in a cheesy way and if you think about it, some characters act really stupidly.  Take Anne for example, she's the main character.  After going through so much in the first book, she returns to make decisions that gets her into trouble again.  And of course she chooses the dangerous boy with lovely blue eyes... hello stereotypes.  The villains were friendlier than in the first book, they didn't 'scare' me as much.  So far, things have only been going downhill.

The best thing would probably be the annoying letter-writing font.  When I flipped through the book to look for the letter sections, I was so relieved it was not there.  However, there weren't very many positives that I could find in Haunted.  It was a very slow book for me, but it was good enough that I kept going, which is a good sign.  The Romanovs are not mentioned much in Haunted, as compared to Dreaming Anastasia when it played a huge part of the story line.  We now read on about Russian mermaids, which still is interesting, but is really different to what I had expected.

Overall, I did not enjoy reading this book.  As soon as I started reading, I was disappointed as it didn't reach my expectations.  I had hoped the sequel would be even better than the first, but for me it was not.  It took far too long to actually get into the action, and a long series of events just dragged on and on.  Until around the last quarter of the book, there was not much that interested me.  I rate Haunted 2 out of 5 stars.

★★

2 stars - It was alright