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Summary
Summary
New from #1 New York Times bestselling author Meg Cabot, a dark, fantastical story about this world . . . and the underworld.Pierce knows what it's like to die, because she's done it before. Though she tries returning to the life she knew before the accident, Pierce can't help but feel at once a part of this world, and apart from it. Yet she's never alone . . . because someone is always watching her.Now she's moved to a new town, but even here, he finds her. Pierce knows he's no guardian angel, and his dark world isn't exactly heaven, yet she can't stay away . . . especially since he always appears when she least expects it, but exactly when she needs him most. If she lets herself fall any further, she may just find herself back in the one place she most fears: the Underworld.
Reviews (5)
School Library Journal Review
Gr 7-10-With this trilogy, loosely based on the Greek myth of Persephone, Cabot takes to the dark side. Pierce Oliviera, Abandon's troubled heroine, returns from the dead after an underworld deity romances her and gives her a rare diamond that anticipates danger. Despite this juicy premise, the book starts out a little slow, crowded with plot developments and foreboding. What follows Pierce's return to Earth is a nightmare. A friend commits suicide, a teacher is maimed, a jewelry store owner nearly dies from a heart attack, all of this told, not shown. Blaming herself for these tragedies, Pierce fails at school. Her mother, desperate for a new start, moves her to the place where she grew up: Isla Huesos, the island of bones. There, Pierce's Uncle Chris is newly released from prison. The cemetery where she first met the deity, John, is an easy bike ride away. And her father, a wealthy industrialist, has ruined the natural environment, including the birds his ex-wife studies and is trying to protect. Top that off with a group of preppies who defy school rules for a senior tradition called "coffin night." Cabot manages to keep this hodgepodge balanced, but the steamy relationship between Pierce and John is just starting. Of course, teens-especially restless fans of "Twilight"-will want to see what happens next. Stay tuned as readers are strung along for a wild, if not yet passionate, attention-grabber.-Tina Zubak, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, PA (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
The wildly rich and beautiful Pierce Oliviera died and came back to life-"I was flatline for over an hour." Ever since, her life has been exceedingly complicated. Two years after Pierce's near-death experience, the 17-year-old has been expelled from her posh Connecticut girls' school; her mother has moved them to the South Florida island of Isla Huesos; and Pierce must cope both with being the new girl and with a dark, handsome guy, who she met while she was dead and who won't leave her alone. While the fun premise and Pierce's irreverent voice are trademark Cabot, this novel has trouble getting off the ground. Cabot loosely hangs her story on the myth of Hades and Persephone, but the plot is hampered by confusing digressions and frequent jumps in time that make it difficult to pinpoint what's in the present and what's in the past. However, Cabot's avid fans-including devotees of her earlier forays into paranormal romance, as in the Mediator series-are likely to forgive the bumpy start to this planned trilogy. Ages 12-up. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Horn Book Review
After Pierce died, she went to, then escaped from, the Underworld. Now she lives with her mom on a stormy Florida island, where she keeps running into John, a (very attractive) "death deity." This first book in a projected series delivers an original and entertaining reimagining of the Persephone and Hades myth. (c) Copyright 2011. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Booklist Review
He was a death deity. I was a senior in high school. This was never going to work out. That's Pierce's astute observation about her push-pull affair with John, who helps the dead find their proper place in the afterlife and whom she met after she drowned in her swimming pool. John wants her to stay with him, but all she wants is to rejoin the living, and she manages that, though nothing is the same as it was before her death. Now, she is in Florida with her mother on an island whose name translates to Isle of the Bones. John is there, too (conveniently, the town graveyard is an entrance to the Underworld), and Pierce has some decisions to make about her future. The writing is choppy, peppered with awkwardly integrated bits of information that take readers back and forth in time. Pierce, however, is an endearing and amusing heroine, and John is an ethereal yet ardent lover who should elicit a few sighs. First in a series, natch.--Cooper, Ilene Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
In this supernatural romance inspired by the myth of Persephone, a girl flirts with a death deity. THERE'S nothing like coming back from the dead to ruin a girl's life. Fifteen-year-old Pierce Oliviera, the heroine of Meg Cabot's new modern-day Persephone trilogy, drowns in the family pool while trying to rescue an injured bird. More than an hour passes, and then she is miraculously revived. But two years later and back among the living, Pierce is haunted by memories of the underworld, especially the stormy death deity who angled to keep her there with him for eternity. A battery of psychiatrists has tried to convince her that all that afterlife nonsense is just so much lucid dreaming. But Pierce knows better. She wears the proof around her neck in the form of an enchanted diamond necklace, a gift from that "aggravatingly attractive" underworld guy, John Hayden, the one who keeps showing up despite the fact that she has a pulse again. Death just won't stay away. In "Abandon," which is the trilogy's first installment, Cabot, author of the frothy "Princess Diaries" series, ventures into darker realms. With vampires, werewolves and mermaids already in wide circulation, here Greek mythology becomes fodder for a modern supernatural romance, one that grapples with the question of how to go on living in the face of death. But the archetypes from mythology are also put to comic effect, and sly humor helps leaven the dark material. This is Hades as seen through the eyes of a 21st-century teenager: there's not even cellphone reception down there, for God's (gods'?) sake. And the recently deceased are sorted into the blessed and the damned by a posse of intimidating men, who, like nightclub bouncers, are clad in black leather, their heads shaved bald and their bodies elaborately tattooed. At one point, Pierce tells her deathly captor: "I have to let my mom know I'm all right. Except for the being dead part." But coming back to life proves more difficult than just giving that silver-eyed death deity the slip. Pierce struggles to regain the life of a normal teenager now that she's seen what lies beyond. Her accident prompts her parents to divorce, her best friend to dump her and her grades to plummet. She loses all interest in working with animal rescue groups and is even stripped of the role of Snow White in a school play, because she identifies a little too much with that heroine frozen in her glass coffin. Meanwhile, she has to try to outmaneuver vengeful Furies while suffering the more pedestrian humiliations of trying to fit in at her new Florida high school. Still, being a modern girl, Pierce knows she has to take care of herself - because no one else will. "It's only in fairy tales that princesses can afford to wait for the handsome prince to save them. In real life, they have to bust out of their own coffins and do the saving themselves." She tries to do just that. Yet, while she may not be waiting around for Prince Charming, her "Prince Terrifying" as she calls John, has a way of turning up with a little heart-stopping muscle - at precisely the moments she needs to be bailed out. John proves to be both captor and savior. Still, his interest in Pierce becomes a kind of prison of its own, condemning her to the wrath of his enemies, irrespective of her conflicted feelings about him. "He was a death deity. I was a senior in high school. This was never going to work," she frets. Not so fast. There are two more books to come in the series. Death is just getting warmed up. Katharine Mieszkowski is a senior writer for The Bay Citizen, a news organization that provides coverage of the San Francisco Bay Area for The Times.