Book review: The Blessed by Tonya Hurley

What if martyrs and saints lived among us? And what if you were told you were one of them?

Meet Agnes, Cecilia, and Lucy. Three lost girls, each searching for something. But what they find is Beyond Belief.

The Blessed was… of varying quality.  There are so many things wrong with this book that make me understand why a lot of the Goodreads reviews said they hadn’t finished it.  A lot of the writing is scattered, bloated with over-description.  The first few hundred pages of the book are rife with them: character descriptions, setting descriptions, and of course clothing descriptions.  And worst of all for me, there were a lot of times that were disconnected in a bad way.  It felt like Hurley tried to edit it and only got through certain lines, leaving others as they were in a previous draft so that it no longer makes sense.  Questions are asked and given answers that don’t make sense even though they act like they do.  Entire plot points come about with no build-up and often exactly opposite to what Cecilia, Agnes and Lucy think and feel in even just the previous chapter.

There’s also the question of just what the book was supposed to convey.  Sebastian insists the girls are saints and that so is he.  The only good writing I really saw involved the psychiatrist, Dr. Frey, as he talks to people and does research in an attempt to understand what is going on.  The fact that the writing is clearer and cleaner in these sequences made me believe more that they were all delusional than that they were actually the reincarnated versions of religious icons, or even descended from them.  Instances that seemed like they were supposed to show the reader they really were saints weren't witnessed by third parties and could easily be written off as delusion or being influenced.

Even in the end it doesn’t become all that clear, but I’m not going to spoil it for anyone reading this book.  I trudged through all 400+ pages, you should too if you really want to see.  I, personally, don’t believe the redeeming factors outweigh the negative factors.  But The Blessed is also part of a trilogy, and call me a masochist, but I’m going to at least see it through to the second book whenever it comes out.  There’s only room to improve, in my opinion, and Hurley does show in the parts mentioned above that she can be a competent writer.