Official Review: Heartbound by P.I. Alltraine

[Morgan_Malone]

[Following is the official OnlineBookClub.org review of "Heartbound" by P.I. Alltraine.]

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2 out of 4 stars

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Heartbound by P.I Alltraine is a young adult, fantasy novel. The story centers around Petyr. Petyr has never taken much notice of humans before, but that was before a deadly disease started killing his species. Now Petyr must go to Earth in order to investigate what about the humans is killing his kind. However, once there, Petyr meets eighteen year old college student Scarlett and soon finds that there are more important things than his mission. As their relationship grows Petyr must choose which is more important, the human girl that he loves or the fate of his own world.

I was very interested in the plot behind this book. The plot has a lot of potential with equal parts fantasy and romance. However, in this book that potential is rarely realized. There are quite a few large problems that I had with this book. The first being the lack of the relationship development and exploration. The second being the lack of explanation that is required to properly set up a fantasy world.

Most of this book was based on the relationship between Petyr and Scarlett. While this in itself is not a problem, it becomes a problem when that relationship is hardly explained whatsoever. The relationship between Petyr and Scarlett developed so rapidly that the reader does not have time to get to know each individual character and understand why they love each other so much. From my point of view while reading it seemed as if one minute Scarlett and Petyr met and the next they were completely in love with each other. I think this relationship would have been much more of an enriching experience if we had gotten to see it build over the course of the book.

The fantasy world in the book was not built well at all. Through the first half of the book small hints about Petyr’s world are dropped here and there, but instead of informing the reader about Petyr’s world it does more to confuse the reader. It was not until halfway through the book that the author starts to explain more in detail about Petyr’s world, but even then the details are still vague and not altogether there. I think that this could have been improved had the book actually started in Petyr’s world, perhaps with a scene showing Petyr receiving the assignment to go to Earth, rather than with Petyr already on Earth.

Overall, I would rate Heartbound 2 out of 4 stars. I thought that this book had a lot of potential with a unique storyline, but without better written relationships and a better explained fantasy world it would be difficult to recommend this book.

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Heartbound
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[bluemel4]

Great insight and critique! It sounds like it was frustrating to have such an intriguing premise and then only get a small amount of it offered. I know I would be curious about how an alien and human could even relate to each other let alone fall in love.

[Levi]

@Morgan_Malone this does sound like an interesting concept that could use some polishing. Hopefully your insight will help the author, and as you were very detailed, I believe it will. Great job!

[ALynnPowers]

I would just like to point out that the cover of this book is awesome! And the story does sound pretty interesting, like something I would get into...

[psyche]

I have to agree that for me, if you say a character is alien but they are indistinguishable from humans that takes a little explanation. Why have the character be alien at all if there is nothing strongly unusual about where they come from or who they are?