Book review: Passionaries (The Blessed #2) by Tonya Hurley

Agnes, Cecelia, and Lucy watched as Sebastian sacrificed himself for what he believed in. Will the girls trust that their destiny as saints and martyrs and perform the miracles as Sebastian instructed? Or lose faith in themselves and each other in his absence? Time is running out for them to make a decision, and the fate of the world lies in the balance.

Passionaries is the sequel to The Blessed, a book I read last year and reviewed rather… unfavorably.  However I did say I’d see it out since I saw potential in it.  I kind of regret it, to be honest.

Passionaries continues the story of Lucy, Agnes and Cecelia a few months after their experiences at the Church of the Precious Blood.  Despite that they should have been keeping in touch and getting through things together, they haven’t so much as texted each other since the investigation into the events and Sebastian’s death.  That was the first problem I had with it; the fact that I didn’t really sympathize with what had happened to them and then they just abandon each other made me really not believe when they talked about how close they are.

A problem I had with the last book was one that a lot of people seemed to have: the fact that it was hard to tell whether they really were reincarnated saints, or if Sebastian was as mentally ill as suggested and he was just influencing them to believe they were because he had the delusion himself and they happened to share the right names.  There’s plenty of proof that there’s something supernatural going on here, but I still found myself doubting who they actually were.  For instance, Cecelia actually shreds two men with some kind of whip sword.  No mercy.  It’s actually really gory.  Am I really supposed to believe she’s a saint when she’s so willing to commit gross atrocities like that?  Honestly.

The one thing that I liked about the first book was the sequences with Dr. Frey.  They were the only thing that I felt was grounded in any sort of reality.  I was hoping it would continue in this book so that there would still be something redeeming about it, if nothing else improved.  I thought that this series had nowhere to go but up.  Unfortunately I was wrong.  Dr. Frey goes from a psychiatrist who’s genuinely worried about Sebastian and the girls to a cardboard-cutout villain who has an evil entourage.  We even get some backstory for him, but it doesn’t help.  All we know is that he used to be a priest, and he defected from religion until he joined the hospital.  There’s honestly no reason why anyone’s doing anything they do in the book.  Yes, saints are supposed to be disbelieved and persecuted, but this goes way too far.

Pretty much all this book does is prove that it could, in fact, get worse.  The exact same bad points from the first book are there, and more are piled on.  I really wish Hurley had improved.  And clearly there are people who enjoyed it.  But I just don’t get why.  Not one I’d recommend.

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.

Teaser Tuesday #1

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

•Grab your current read
•Open to a random page
•Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
•BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
•Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Here's my teaser:

"His life is really none of our business, and vice versa," Cecilia whispered.  "Once the storm passes, we'll go back to our lives like none of this ever happened."

-The Blessed by Tonya Hurley