Vesper by Jeff Sampson review

Vesper by Jeff Sampson
Source: Library
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Emily Webb is an "entertainment geek." She loves her DVDs and books and could spend most of her time in her room. In fact, she usually does. So when she finds herself with one foot out of her window, about to jump out, she's confused. First, she doesn't know why she wanted to do this in the first place. Second, she's wearing her stepsister's clubbing clothes. She's usually the jeans and a hoodie type of girl. She has no memory from the time she was just reading, to now.

She grabs her ringing phone and finds out from her best friend Megan that a classmate of theirs, the "other" Emily, is dead, shot twice. So is it a coincidence that Emily Webb was just acting like she thought Emily C. always acted like?

Now every night, Emily is changing into "Nighttime Emily." With each change, it becomes quicker and less painful. She becomes stronger and quicker. And with a murderer on the loose - one that just so happens to be killing people of her kind, whatever that may be - that may not be a bad thing. But one thing, why does she suddenly want to sniff boys to see if they're "the one"?

First of all, it was hard to write a synopsis for this book, because everything I wrote seemed confusing. Vesper is not confusing at all. Maybe in a sense that you want answers so you're confused as to what she is, but not in a way that it doesn't make sense.

Emily was a great character. She was smart, geeky, and insecure, meaning she had a personality. She had depth. She's way too insecure with herself, and that really was a contrast to Nighttime Emily's confidence in herself. I was wishing as the pages went on that Emily would see she really is pretty and to make a step in being more confident as her Daytime self.

The other characters didn't have as much personality, but in a way that was mysterious instead of flat. They had enough personality to be able to be built up for the series, instead of giving everything away in the first book. Most of them had a purpose in the book - even if you didn't find it out in this first installment - and none of them seemed like filler characters to make the story longer. I really liked this fact.

The plot was awesome. It had lots of twists and turns toward the middle and end. I wanted to find out exactly what she was and that answer didn't seem to come fast enough. Jeff Sampson did a wonderful job with the suspense. It didn't leave you feeling like it was drawn out too much, but just enough. He wrote Vesper beautifully. The descriptions were amazing and it felt like he was playing a movie for me, he described things so well. He wrote a female character with ease, not often seen with a male author.

I couldn't get into Vesper that much at first, which was surprising, because the plot was so intriguing. I blame this on the fact that I was just distracted, so if you find yourself not really getting into it at first, please, stick it out until at least the middle, if not the whole book, because it picks up even more.

Overall, I felt Vesper was a very well done young adult debut and will gladly read the rest of the series and any young adult novel Jeff Sampson writes. I felt like I was reading a book by a young adult veteran. I highly recommend this book.

I give this book a 5 out of 5.

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