(Cover picture courtesy of All The Stacks.)

Tavia Michaels is the sole survivor of the plane crash that killed her parents. When she starts to see strange visions of a boy she’s never spoken with in real life, she begins to suspect that there’s much about her past that she isn’t being told.

Tavia immediately searches for answers, desperate to determine why she feels so drawn to a boy she hardly knows. But when Tavia discovers that the aunt and uncle who took her in after her parents’ death may have actually been responsible for the plane crash that killed them–and that she may have been the true intended victim–she flees for the safety of Camden, Maine, where the boy she sees in her visions instructs her to go.

Now, Tavia is on the run with no one to trust. No one, that is, except for her best friend and longtime crush, Benson.

Tavia feels torn between the boy who mysteriously comes to her at night and the boy who has been by her side every step of the way. But what Tavia doesn’t know is that the world is literally falling apart and that to save it she will have to unite with the boy in her visions. Only problem? To do so would mean rejecting Benson’s love. And that’s the one thing Tavia Michaels swore she’d never do.

I wanted to like this book.  I really, really did.  It was a Christmas present from my best friend, who usually has pretty good taste in books.  She thought it sounded interesting, I thought it sounded slightly interesting.  Why not give it a try?

Except for the fact that it’s a waste of your money, totally and utterly.  If you changed the character’s names around you probably wouldn’t notice until about halfway through that the book isn’t Twilight.  It’s trite and cliché and the characters were just painful.  I was stuck in the viewpoint of Tavia the whole time and began actively cheering for her doom sometime around page 50.

Tavia is what we in the book industry call Too Stupid To Live.  She believes her male stalker is not only trustworthy and harmless, but attractive as well!  She follows this stalker in an unfamiliar place, not telling anyone where she’s going and all this while she’s on the run from people who want to kill her.  Then she puts on the necklace that the voice of her past self in her head tells her to, essentially knowing that it’s going to change her forever and possibly kill her.  Too.  Stupid.  To.  Live.

Could the love interests be any blander?  Quinn is a stalker, as usual, but Tavia loves him because he’s such a nice stalker!  He would never harm her.  (Cue eye-rolling.)  Benson is such a typical geeky best-friend-who’s-secretly-in-love type that it made me want to throw the book at the wall.  I would have but I don’t condone book vandalism.  There was no unique spin on him and even at the end when his character supposedly changes I saw it coming a mile away and if you have the misfortune to read Earthbound, you will too.

The plot, oh the plot.  It was all over the place, as if Aprilynne Pike couldn’t decide what she wanted to write: a reincarnation love story, a contemporary thriller or an urban fantasy novel.  When we finally get an explanation for the Earthbound people my eyes almost rolled out of my head.  Triangles being their sign, really?  You couldn’t think of anything more original than that.  There wasn’t even a new twist on that!  Also, Pike needs to do some research about ancient Egypt.  She seems to have gotten the First Dynasty mixed up with the Fourth.  Oh well, what’s a couple hundred years?

The only reason I finished this book is because I’m incredibly stubborn.  It’s not worth your time or the few braincells that are required to read it.  There are no redeeming qualities in Earthbound at all so I guarantee this is the first and last book I’ll read by this author.

I give this book 0/5 stars.

Amazon     Barnes and Noble     Goodreads