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Calder is a Fetch, a soul who escorts people on their journey to heaven. One day he shows up at a Death Scene, waiting to see if an infant chooses to die or not. The woman holding the baby takes his breath away. She’s beautiful and has a kind, caring, sad face. He can’t get her out of his thoughts, and his work begins to suffer for it.
The Fetch was okay, I just felt like I never really connected with anyone. I’m beginning to wonder if I really don’t like third-person narratives and just never noticed before. Here, I just felt like I was told a lot of stuff and not really shown anything. I’m told that Calder has always felt like he shouldn’t be a Fetch because he has trouble with obedience, but the little I see before the story really starts shows a guy who honestly tries his best. Eventually I was told that he’s in love with someone, but I didn’t really see it happening. Maybe the author was trying to keep the story short, but I felt like this book should have been longer to show me everything that was happening rather than just telling me and hoping that I accepted it.
At the beginning, Alexis is a whiny, bratty teenager. I freely admit that if I’d gone through what he’d gone through, I would have easily out-whined him. But I have very, very little tolerance for angsty teenagers, so he really turned me off.
There were times that I just wanted to shake Calder and tell him to start thinking. He finds out that there are two things he has to do. One of them was obvious to me from the beginning. It took him forever to figure it out.
Calder ends up on a journey that lasts most of the book, and it ultimately felt like there was absolutely no point to it. No point at all.
There were things I liked. I liked the author’s ideas and descriptions of what happens on the journey to heaven. I didn’t really read a synopsis or any reviews before picking this up, so I had no idea when the story took place or who it involved. I really liked both, but I won’t tell you any more than that. And that’s a shame because it makes it look like there were more things I disliked than otherwise. This really was about half and half, but I don’t want to give anything away.
The subtitle for this is A Supernatural Romance. If that appeals to you, and you know that you don’t mind being told things rather than shown, go ahead and pick it up. It really was a unique story with a lot of promise, it just didn’t quite live up to what I expected.
