The Messenger Reviews

When I saw this book at the bookstore, I saw it as the book that Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children could have been. So, for Halloween, I decided I would give it a try. And while this book wasn't quite what I was looking for, it was still better than MPHFPC. I think the style of book is a hard thing to master, and I have yet to see someone who truly does it well. 
One issue I had with this book is that I feel like the story is shaped around the pictures, not the other way around. The pictures seemed to be the focal point, and the rest of the plot just seemed superfluous, supporting the pictures instead of being supported by them. Hunches were followed and taken as fact for the sake of advancing the plot, and it left me feeling cheated. I felt like things were overly simplified, and important things were often poorly explained. The author chose not to explain important plot details, but to instead take the easy way out. 
As a person who very much enjoys characterization and character depth, I was very disappointed by this book. I felt like all the cards were shown too early, leaving nothing for me to discover. Information was spoon-fed at the very beginning, and very little was learned about the characters after the first twenty pages or so. I would have liked more character development, and some more complex characters. They seemed simple, and I felt like little thought was put into them and their relationships. Two of the characters date, but their romantic encounters are incredibly anticlimactic, and pretty much unnecessary. 
While this book was better than the other, highly similar book I've read, it still wasn't my favorite. The plot was interesting enough, but I found the characters incredibly lacking. The book felt sort of half-baked to me, and I would have appreciated that more thought would have been put into both the plot and the characters. I felt like the book relied on the picture idea to carry it, and the rest of the book suffered because of it. But, I can see how people could be into this kind of thing, especially photographers or more artsy people.