Review: 'Portal' by Imogen Rose

I bought this book because it was very cheap for the Kindle, and it has a time travel/alternate reality theme. It is intended for young adults, so perhaps I was expecting too much from it, but I thought it was very badly written. The teenage heroine bounces around her life texting her friends and selecting her branded clothes, simply accepting without too much protest the odd things that seem to be happening. Most of the book is written in the first person, with some jarring jumps to other chara...moreI bought this book because it was very cheap for the Kindle, and it has a time travel/alternate reality theme. It is intended for young adults, so perhaps I was expecting too much from it, but I thought it was very badly written. The teenage heroine bounces around her life texting her friends and selecting her branded clothes, simply accepting without too much protest the odd things that seem to be happening. Most of the book is written in the first person, with some jarring jumps to other characters' viewpoints for exposition purposes. The dialogue is repetitive and banal, and, maybe it's just me, but all the characters seem to be absurdly *nice*. Even the statutory bad guys are not terribly evil.

The best I can say for it is that I finished it. Apparently it's the first of a series, but I won't be bothering with the rest. One star. [First written February 2011]