Review: The Splendour Falls by Rosemary Clement-Moore

Title: The Splendor Falls

Author: Rosemary Clemente-Moore

Publisher: Delacorte Books for Young Readers (Feb 4th 2010)

No. of Pages: 528

Grade Rating: C+

 Sylvie Davis is a ballerina who can’t dance. A broken leg ended her career, but Sylvie’s pain runs deeper. What broke her heart was her father’s death, and what’s breaking her spirit is her mother’s remarriage—a union that’s only driven an even deeper wedge into their already tenuous relationship.

Uprooting her from her Manhattan apartment and shipping her to Alabama is her mother’s solution for Sylvie’s unhappiness. Her father’s cousin is restoring a family home in a town rich with her family’s history. And that’s where things start to get shady. As it turns out, her family has a lot more history than Sylvie ever knew. More unnerving, though, are the two guys that she can’t stop thinking about. Shawn Maddox, the resident golden boy, seems to be perfect in every way. But Rhys—a handsome, mysterious foreign guest of her cousin’s—has a hold on her that she doesn’t quite understand.

Then she starts seeing things. Sylvie’s lost nearly everything—is she starting to lose her mind as well?

When I went into The Splendor Falls, I was expecting a gripping, spine-chilling novel filled with intrigue and deception. I have to say I was somewhat disappointed which was a shame because I really, really wanted to love it.

The best way of describing this book is slow. There is no denying that this book was very long but I felt, as I was reading, that it didn't need to be. Much of the plot at the beginning was basically just rambling along and it was hard to see where the storyline was going. You had to read around 300 pages before anything exciting and relevant to the blurb really happend. That is only 200 pages of action in a 500 page book. I understand that there is a back story to the plot and as things eventually begin to pan out, you realize this but I don't think that it needed 300 pages to do so. In all fairness, there were times when the goings on made my heart stop as you identified with the main character, Sylvie, so much. The characters were definitely one of the good things about this novel but I wandered how long I would have to read about a garden or about Stone-Henge.

The characterization was fairly strong throughout this book. As before, I definitely identified and related to Sylvie. I liked the way she held herself and her no-nonsense attitude towards the boys that played a big part in the book; Shawn and Rhys. Each character had their own individual personality and relationship with each other which was refreshing to read about. I do wish though, that the feelings between Shawn and Rhys took more of a dramatic turn instead of ' I don't like you.' I did find that many random characters popped-up in unusual places which made it hard to remember who was who. This had me flipping back the pages at various points.

I thought that the ending wrapped up nicely but I felt that the last few chapters were rushed. This made me even more aware how many pages of average life there was. I liked how all of the details that didn't seem to have much relevance at the beginning, knitted together to form the ending. I must say that it was nice to see a non-vampire book enter the YA paranormal genre, especially as it was a ghost tale.