Review: Seeker by Arwen Elys Dayton

Summary

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.

My thoughts

Thanks to a somewhat spoilery summary I was VERY excited about Seeker. I already knew what the job of a Seeker is and thought this was going to be an epic adventure because of what the main characters was going to do. Instead I was constantly annoyed and deeply disappointed. I think I would have felt even more so if I hadn’t known that fact about Seekers before.

First of all, I hate unnecessary secrets. I don’t mind if the main characters themselves are kept in secret for some reason or other but keeping something from the reader what the main character, the one who tells the story, knows, is just really annoying. Once X finds out what the real job of a Seeker is, the story starts missing HUGE parts. At first I was wondering if I’m just missing parts in my eARC, it was that bad, but the author really just didn’t tell them to keep it a secret for longer. You don’t get to read about anything she does as a Seeker for way too long and that was the part I was most excited about. The very first action as a Seeker is her entering a house, being afraid (you don’t know why) and then the chapter ends. In the next one she is already back, covered in blood and then they don’t talk about it anymore. Seriously!? I was so angry at that moment.
There is another POV who already has all the facts and even a whole other secret on his own but of course he doesn’t talk openly about any of this either. 
It was all so frustrating and annoying I wanted to just read the end to get to know everything.

That also had a huge impact on the worldbuilding. It was the exact opposite of info dump in this case, pretty much non existing. Everything is kept secret for so long, you don’t get to read about the exciting things that make this world interesting. Instead you just read about a pretty normal world while knowing there is a lot more going on. It’s not even the lack of ideas, I actually think the author created a great concept, she just doesn’t make use of it.

What I also didn’t like is that the story had this switch in between and was suddenly completely different to the beginning. This was accomplished by another plot device I really don’t like much: memory loss. Totally unrealistic in this case and I really didn’t like it. There is no characters development but instead it felt like they were exchanged for completely new ones. It also didn’t help, that I wasn’t fond of any of these characters and I didn’t care for them at all.

Add to that a romance that didn’t work for me at all. Mostly because it was one of those love triangles that I deeply hate. The kind where the girl doesn’t just love one of them, but switches between the guys, can’t decide who she really loves, and spends an awful lot of time with the guy who actually hurt her and her family (physically) but still can’t stop loving him. This was all just another ingredient that fueled my annoyance.

I had high hope for this one and thought I would get to read a new exciting series about a topic that I love reading about, but was deeply disappointed instead. Seeker didn’t live up to my expactations at all.