Short Story Review – The Abandoned by Amanda Stevens (3.5/5 stars)

Reading level: Adult
Genre: Urban Fantasy
Size: 228 KB
Publisher: Mira
Release Date: April 1, 2011
ASIN:  B004RQD3J8
Stand Alone or Series: Prequel to Graveyard Queen series
Source: Kindle Freebie
Rating: 3.5/5 stars

I read, The Restorer, the first book in The Graveyard Queen series and really loved it.  So I picked up this prequel freebie.  While the story is good, it doesn’t represent the series very well.  In fact the story doesn’t even follow Amelia Grey, but a side character named Ree.

Ree works at a mental hospital.  When one of her patients dies she overhears some shadey secrets.  Then Ree finds herself sleeping walking strange places and thinks maybe a ghost is involved.  Now she has to figure out what the ghost wants so it will leave her alone.

I was a bit disappointed that Amelia is only in this story very briefly.  Most of the story is told from Ree’s perspective.  It is mainly a mystery romance type of story and I didn’t think it had any of the magic that the first book in the series had.  The romance is cute and some of the graveyard descriptions are beautiful and haunting.

While the story is decently written, I didn’t find Ree an engaging character and didn’t really enjoy reading about her that much.  This story is definitely not a good intro to this series; it touches on ghosts but doesn’t have any of the beauty and mystery of Amelia’s character.

Overall this was an okay short story.  I do not recommend reading this for a preview of the Graveyard Queen series; this story only loosely touches on Amelia and what she does and wasn’t nearly as well-written as the book was.  So if you have read the book and want to read a little more, then by all means pick it up.  Please do not read this and then decide not to read the book, the book was a million times better than this brief story.

This goes towards the following reading challenges:
– Show Me the Free Challenge