Nemesis by Brendan Reichs

My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars

I’m really struggling to write a review of Nemesis. Firstly because I really can’t decide what I think about it and secondly because it’s really difficult to talk about Nemesis without spoilers.

So what did I like? The premise is great, every other year on her birthday Min (Melinda) is brutally murdered by a man in a suit wearing sunglasses. However Min doesn’t stay dead but wakes up in the woods with no memory of how she got there and no evidence that the killing took place. Meanwhile, Noah (who coincidentally shares a birthday with Min) is having terrifying nightmares about violent murders and death.

After her latest death on her sixteenth birthday, Min decides she wants answers. Noah wants a cure. At the same time the residents of the small town in Idaho where she lives are all on edge waiting on an announcement about whether a planet killing asteroid is on a collision course with earth.

It’s definitely unlike anything I’ve ever read before and I have to salute the author for creating a completely unique and slightly crazy (in a good way) story. At times I did think maybe there was a little bit too much thrown in but I loved the unpredictability of it and found it very difficult to stop reading as I tried to figure out what was going on.

The story is told from both Min and Noah’s points of view and while Min was likeable enough it was Noah I found the more interesting, complex and frustrating of the two. Despite coming from money and hanging with the popular crowd he suffers from anxiety and is riddled with self doubt. While it is frustrating watching him hesitate, let others make decisions for him and generally just panic and freeze up it’s great to have a character behave the way I probably would if I’m being honest.

The secondary characters are a little bit cliched but they too don’t always behave the way you expect them to. It’s set in a high school so you do have the class clown, the bullying jocks, the rich popular mean girls and the various groups of outcasts. There are actually a heck of a lot of secondary characters and again I think that was one of my issues with this book. I am not great with remembering who’s who and there were so many names that I gave up trying and focused on the most important ones.

The writing is ok. The plot does get a little complicated in places and I found myself going over certain bits more than once. What I thought really let it down however, and the reason I rated as I have is that I just didn’t feel it. I was intrigued about what would happen next and the twists and surprises kept me hooked but I didn’t connect with any of the characters so felt a little bit detached from the whole thing. There were a few scenes that should have triggered some kind of emotion (tears, laughter, shock) but the whole thing left me cold.

I would still recommend you give it a try but at the moment I’m undecided about whether I’ll continue to read this series.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an ARC. As always all views are my own.