Review of Insight

This review is based on an e-book copy of Insight by Jamie Magee that I purchased for myself via my Kindle.

*WARNING: Review may contain minor spoilers.*

Goodreads Summary: "Some say that dreams are the doorway to the soul. Willow Haywood is no stranger to that doorway. Each night she shares a blissful, silent dream with a stunning blue-eyed boy. With each new moon she is haunted by a painful nightmare shared with a different boy, who's always hidden by the shadows.

In her waking hours she must battle her sixth sense. The one that allows her to feel others emotions as if they were her own. This insight is exhausting and frustrating causing her to draw inward, only trusting her family and few close friends. Oddly, this sense also attracts ghostly images that seem to appear out of nowhere. With a touch, they take her to wherever they may be, allowing her to change their emotion. This alone would cause most to go insane, but Willow filters her aggression by painting, capturing the emotion she changed.

One August night a nightmare came days after the new moon. In this dream the shadowed boy marked her wrist with star, leaving her father no choice but to share a family secret that would tie all of the odd attributes of Willow's life together. Now, she has no choice but to outrun the fate that is closing in around her.

In an attempt to lure her, the shadowed figure captures her closest friends. In order to save them, she must weave through broken myths, half truths, and the undeniable power of the Zodiac. With each step she takes Willow comes to realize that she has lived before, her path is one that she chose, and this trial is simply the beginning."

As soon as I saw the summary of this story I was hooked, it was immediately put on my wish list and one of the first purchases I made upon receiving my first Amazon Gift Card. I was excited to read it but as I bought more and more books Insight eventually fell the wayside. When things calmed down and I was finally able to pick it up again I did so believing that it would blow me out of the water.

Insight had a lot of potential to be an amazing read. Between the actual insights themselves, the use of the zodiac and the manipulation of dreams there was a lot that could be done with it. Unfortunately these amazing concepts never really shown through for me. Instead they were mired by the romance between Willow and her love. As soon as Willow met the one that she was destined to be with any traces of the plot seemed to fall to the wayside, it was all "Let's hurry through the plot so we can be all lovey-dovey again!" which just doesn't work for me. There was an excuse for this as both Willow and her dream-boy suffered immense pain upon separation which in all honesty put me in mind of Twilight when Edward left Bella.

I tried to like this story, I really did, but about half-way through it became work. Actually once the love interest simply became the love I was over it. Considering she had dreamed of this guy the majority of her life than suddenly he just poof appeared it seemed rather anticlimactic. And than after that, as I said before, their love was the primary focus. At least that’s the way that I saw it.

And the ending, I won't give it away I promise just in case you do decide to read it, was just so anticlimactic. Not that the story really built it up to much of a climax. There wasn't much excitement at all. I never was concerned for the characters or worried about the outcome.

I'm giving Insight by Jamie Magee a two out of five. It was an okay read but it never really captivated me in the slightest. I wanted so badly to give this book at least a three but it just wasn't there for me. Outside of reading it I never really contemplated the story, Insight tended to be out of sight as well as out of mind. Normally I would have flown through a book of it's length in a single day and it wasn't the case here. I never found myself dropping everything to read this book or staying up all night to discover it's conclusion, I was lukewarm at best. Seeing all of the high ratings for this book I was expecting more and unfortunately I just couldn't. At ninety-nine cents [e-book version] I'm not saying that it was a bad buy just one that will be soon forgotten.