Within, like, 2 pages of finding Rowan, HE TAKES HER RIGHT BACK TO VAUGHN. So the whole reason that Rhine ran away was so that she could find her brother and escape Vaughn. Like, Jesus Christ on a fucking cracker, it takes more more than 4 hours for me to drive to the Grand Canyon and I live in goddamn Arizona. By the way, they're trying to get from Florida to NY, which is like, at least a day's drive. These dimwits drive for FOUR HOURS before they decide they are exhausted, park, and then get kidnapped. Guess she just doesn't care about Rowan and Gabriel enough to stop doing nothing and go find them.Ĥ. Literally half a book later, after aimless hanging out with Vaughn's brother and doing nothing, she finally decides to leave. So Rhine has been planning to leave to go find her brother since, like, page one. ? What are you doing? What's the plan, Rhine?ģ. So not only does Vaughn know where she is/visit regularly, but she just, like, stays there for a while. She wants to escape from Vaughn, so what does she do? She teams up with Linden, who is loyal to Vaughn, and Cecily, who has a tracker somewhere in her body that ALLOWS VAUGHN TO LOCATE HER, and goes to the least obvious place possible. Rhine is a mindbogglingly useless, fickle, aimless protagonist.

It's completely unbelievable and forced.Ģ. The author just pushes him wherever she wants her plot to go. Do you see what I'm saying? He doesn't act logically. But oh, the moment Cecily tells him that she wants to go to back to Vaughn, he's cool with that too. But then suddenly (and with no additional evidence) he & Cecily do believe her, so they want to escape too. Like, okay-first he doesn't believe Rhine, but he still wants to help her escape (?). He's simply a puppet for moving the plot forward by whatever means necessary. Calling him stupid would be giving him too much credit because that would actually be assigning him a distinct characteristic that dictates the way he acts. We'll start with Linden, who is possibly the stupidest character I have ever had the displeasure of reading. Let's start with the complete helpless idiocy of our main characters. Like, where do I even begin? This book is a lesson in how to not fucking write dystopian fiction.

I made it through the first half without much issue, but I was literally guzzling wine during the last half because I needed something to temper the rage, fury, and general disgust that was actually making my blood pressure increase. This is honestly the worst fucking book I've read in my life.

Sever by Lauren DeStefano