Rating: 2 stars
The night Quin Kincaid takes her Oath, she will become what she has trained to be her entire life. She will become a Seeker. This is her legacy, and it is an honor.
As a Seeker, Quin will fight beside her two closest companions, Shinobu and John, to protect the weak and the wronged. Together they will stand for light in a shadowy world.
And she’ll be with the boy she loves—who’s also her best friend.
But the night Quin takes her Oath, everything changes. Being a Seeker is not what she thought. Her family is not what she thought. Even the boy she loves is not who she thought. And now it’s too late to walk away.
I read Seeker in May and posted my thoughts about it on Goodreads. However, I want to go more in-depth about why I didn’t enjoy reading this book as much as I was hoping. But before I go into all of that, I’d first like to talk about what I liked about Seeker.
I really enjoyed how the author switched the points of view between different characters. This gave the reader a unique experience that you don’t see very often when reading books. Especially fantasy books like this one. The different points of view gave the reader a better understanding of what was really going on in the story because not only did the reader hear the story from the perspective of the main character Quin, but also from other characters in their world who played a pivotal role in maintaining the balance between good and evil, such as Maud. I also enjoyed hearing the story from John’s perspective. Though John is one of the main antagonists of Seeker, I felt as if I could understand what he was doing. I also enjoyed learning more about the technology and the setting in the world surrounding the characters in this book, such as learning about their different weaponry for fighting.
However, I found that I was displeased reading Seeker more than anything else. While the plot of the book kept me interested in wanting to read more, the execution of the plot was overall disappointing and not very clearly organized. The reader discovers that Seekers are not the knights in shining armor that protect the good like Quin thought they were. But the reader never gets an explanation of what all exactly they do.
I also was disappointed in the character development of Quin and her cousin Shinobu. When they end up traveling to Hong Kong, I felt myself becoming disoriented at the sequence of events that happened while they were there. Both Quin and Shinobu almost seemed like different characters in Seeker, trying to escape their past instead of doing everything in their power to stop John from getting an athame. I also thought that the relationship between Quin and Shinobu came out of nowhere. The reader knew in the beginning of the book that Shinobu had strong feelings for Quin, but I felt as if Quin’s feelings for her cousin came out of thin air and that they weren’t real. While I’m not particularly a fan of incest in books I read, if the relationship of love between the two characters is clear to see and the writing is well-written, I don’t mind it as much. But Quin and Shinobu’s relationship just happens with no explanation.
The only reason I kept reading was out of the hope that Seeker would get better for me. Instead, this book fell flat and really left me disappointed. I don’t recommend Seeker as a book to read because it didn’t fulfill my hopes for what I thought it was going to be and the plot was under developed.
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