Helens-of-Troy by Janine McCaw (Book Review)

About the Book

“The Gilmore Girls meet Buffy the Vampire Slayer”

Fifteen year old Goth-chic Ellie has a lot of explaining to do. She’s just moved to the small town of Troy, fought with her uptight mother Helen, met the boy of her dreams and found a dead body on her sexy “new-age” grandmother Helena’s porch. All on the first night!

But Ellie’s not alone. Helen is hiding something. Helen knows all about the kind of eerie dreams her daughter is having — the dreams that show the whereabouts of the missing children of Troy — because she’s had them herself. But she’ll never admit it. Not while Ellie’s sex-crazed friend Ryan is safely behind bars for the murders. Helen knows what it’s like to be attracted to dangerous men.

Then there’s the little matter between Helena and Gaspar Bonvillaine, the teenaged vampire who is learning to feed on young prey. Now that he’s caught Ellie, he doesn’t know whether he wants to kill her or turn her to the dark side and keep her forever. Helena should have finished him off when she had the chance.

To survive the vampire feeding frenzy surrounding them, mom Helen needs to come to terms with her own insecurities and deal with the gifts she has. Helena must learn to ground herself for the good of mankind and more importantly her own family. And Ellie has the toughest choice of all. Ellie must decide whether its time to let her own childhood go and become the woman she is destined to be, one of the ageless and timeless “Helens of Troy”.

Author Janine McCaw (Olivia’s Mine, Feb. 2006,) has written this 100,000 word novel, the first in a fantasy series about “the Helens”. The three generations of gatekeepers will take the reader on a trip to a realm mere mortals fear to visit alone, and they’ll make her want to stay a while.

My Review (2 / 5 Stars)

You know, I really wanted to love this book. It was billed as "The Gilmore Girls meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer", so I had high hopes.

I started noticing minor editing issues, missing quotation marks, apostrophes used to pluralise words, that sort of thing. This was still early, though (maybe 10% in), and they weren't too bad. The story was compelling enough for me to ignore them. "Maybe it's worth three stars, at least," I thought. Plus, I was really feeling The Gilmore Girls vibe at that point, and I LOVE The Gilmore girls.

But the editing got worse. Not only the punctuation problems, I saw lots of redundancy, people "Thinking to themselves" or "Shrugging their shoulders". No. Unless you're writing about telepaths, thinking to yourself is redundant. Okay, so there are some instances of telepathy in this book, but none of them had anything to do with it - it's not like anybody was thinking to themselves as opposed to thinking to others or anything.

There's lots of head-hopping too. In the same scene, sometimes in the same paragraph. To the point where at the top of the screen on my e-reader, I'm seeing the thoughts and feelings of one character, and by the time I get to the end of the screen, I'm in a completely different one's head. It actually got confusing at times.

The thing is, the story got worse as well... or maybe it was just my enjoyment of it being affected by all those others issues. Either way, by the time I finished the book, it was all seeming just a little silly.

Great potential, but poor editing grossly let this book down.