The Arrivals by Melissa Marr

The Arrivals by Melissa Marr

2013, William Morrow

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Rating

Synopsis: Chloe walks into a bar and blows five years of sobriety. When she wakes, she finds herself in an unfamiliar world, The Wasteland. She discovers people from all times and places have also arrived there: Kitty and Jack, a brother and sister from the Wild West; Edgar, a prohibition bootlegger; Francis, a one-time hippie; Melody, a mentally unbalanced 1950s housewife; and Hector, a former carnival artist.

None know why they arrived there--or if there is way out of a world populated by monsters and filled with corruption.

The Good: The premise was awesome. What a perfectly unique idea. People, ripped from their own time periods, brought together in this unfamiliar land having no idea how or why. The execution of the characters themselves was spectacular. You'd think that the supernatural angles would be overkill on top of a solid science fiction base, but you'd be wrong in this case. They meshed well and caused a majority of the novel to go in directions you could never see coming.

The Bad: Westerns aren't my thing. I thought I could look past that, given the magical and science fiction aspects of the story, but I was wrong. No matter how unusual and interesting the story, I couldn't get into it because everything revolved around the western ways of life in some degree. Due to this, it was very slow reading for me.