Review: Every Other Day

Every Other Day by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Release Date ~ December 27, 2011
EgmontUSA
ISBN13: 9781606841693
Received from: publisher on Net Galley for review

Goodreads Synopsis:
Every other day, Kali D'Angelo is a normal sixteen-year-old girl. She goes to public high school. She attends pep rallies. She's human.
And then every day in between . . .She's something else entirely.
Though she still looks like herself, every twenty-four hours predatory instincts take over and Kali becomes a feared demon-hunter with the undeniable urge to hunt, trap, and kill zombies, hellhounds, and other supernatural creatures. Kali has no idea why she is the way she is, but she gives in to instinct anyway. Even though the government considers it environmental terrorism.
When Kali notices a mark on the lower back of a popular girl at school, she knows instantly that the girl is marked for death by one of these creatures. Kali has twenty-four hours to save her and, unfortunately, she'll have to do it as a human. With the help of a few new friends, Kali takes a risk that her human body might not survive. . .and learns the secrets of her mysterious condition in the process.

The first thing that grabbed me with the book was the description. A girl with natural predatory and hunter instincts that take over every other day? I was dying of curiousity to know what she was and why she was drawn to act that way.

But unfortunately, Every Other Day didn't interest me as much as I had hoped, and most of its revelations did very little to satisfy my inital curiousity.

1. Full of twists and unexpected turns:
   Yes, I did just say that that I was unimpressed (for the most part) with the twists and revelations as they unfolded. HOWEVER, there were so many in the book that I couldn't help but end up surprised by the ending. And it was those last few chapters that really grabbed me and held my attention, because the book didn't end up being as predictable as it seemed to be while I was reading it.
2. Romance takes the backseat:
   It really can be refreshing to read a book with minimal romance, and although I feared at first that there was going to be (yet again) some forced love triangle, I'm so pleased to say that it did not develop that way at all. Romance is barely there, and if I'm being totally honest it isn't really there at all. There's some potential interest and chemistry, but it isn't the driving force of the plot.

But overall, it fell flat for me and didn't meet my expectations like I had hoped it would. I was looking forward to something new and unexpected, but it ended up being more predictable and common.

And I was completely confused by the lack of backstory to this one. Such little information was given to the setting of the story, and it took me a while to figure out that the preternatural occurences and creatures were actually common knowledge. Go figure. Yet at the same time, no one really had a clue as to what to do about it. Nothing irked me as much about this book as the lack of explanation here did.