Book Review: The Delphi Effect by Rysa Walker

BLURB

It’s never wise to talk to strangers…and that goes double when they’re dead. Unfortunately, seventeen-year-old Anna Morgan has no choice. Resting on a park bench, touching the turnstile at the Metro station—she never knows where she’ll encounter a ghost. These mental hitchhikers are the reason Anna has been tossed from one foster home and psychiatric institution to the next for most of her life.

When a chance touch leads her to pick up the insistent spirit of a girl who was brutally murdered, Anna is pulled headlong into a deadly conspiracy that extends to the highest levels of government. Facing the forces behind her new hitcher’s death will challenge the barriers, both good and bad, that Anna has erected over the years and shed light on her power’s origins. And when the covert organization seeking to recruit her crosses the line by kidnapping her friend, it will discover just how far Anna is willing to go to bring it down.

REVIEW

I have received this copy via Netgalley.

Firs thoughts on the book, it got me hooked on the first pages and chapters of the book. It was actually quite good. It was until Anna stopped talking to the ghost of Molly. This is a story where the main character, and some other supporting characters, is having some sort of sixth sense or psychic abilities. But it’s not your normal paranormal story where the psychic person is talking to the ghost and at the same see them. No, this one is different. Way different than what I usually read. It succeeded on giving me the thought that the book is set on the future. A futuristic psychic people!

Anna Morgan is the main character in the story. She has the ability to pick up ghosts on some things she touch. All are unintentional, of course. You wouldn’t know when there’s ghost in the things you touch, right? As Anna put it, the ghosts that she picked up were her hitchers. They hitch a ride on Anna’s mind and body just until they finish their unfinished business. So, Anna has this ability and she picked up Molly Porter in a piano somewhere. And that’s where her story started.

I was reading really fast when I started this and I don’t seem to want to stop reading. It has a very good momentum in it. But my smooth sailing read was cut when Molly’s ghost departed from Anna’s brain and body that soon. Though I understand why she left but the reason that got me hooked in the first place was gone when Molly did too. I don’t know why. Maybe I just want the part where Anna can talk to someone inside her head from time to time. Makes you feel like you have the inside scoop of the story.

Good news is, it got me hooked again on the part where Anna was captured and got tested and do other stuff. That’s where the thrill starts. The secrets were slowly revealing; the reasons why things happen the way it did. The next thing I knew, I couldn’t stop reading again.

There are only some points where I have issues. The story is good, don’t get me wrong. But there are things in the way Ms Walker wrote her book that made me really really off. As I was reading the book, I experienced some adrenaline-ish situation. Because it’s capture-and-escape kind of story, the escape part is always the thrilling part and full of adrenaline when you’re reading it. But the abrupt stop is the party pooper. And what’s worse, you wouldn’t notice that the thrill had just abruptly stopped. Right, crazy.  

And don’t get me started on the ending. Talk about a total unexpected ending. It was a cliffhanger kind of ending but it seriously didn’t feel like one. One minute they were running away from things, the next Anna is sleeping calmly in a car’s passenger seat dreaming of something good and then the end.

I don’t know if I want to read the second book more because of its ending. But I seriously want to read the second book for the reason that I want to know what will happen to Anna now that she has two hitchers inside her brain. And the people who captured her were still alive. Yup, I will definitely read the second book. Hoping I could get my hands on it, no matter what its format is.

RATE: 4.5/5

About the Author...

RYSA WALKER is the author of the bestselling CHRONOS Files series. Timebound, the first book in the series, was the Young Adult and Grand Prize winner in the 2013 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards. 

Rysa grew up on a cattle ranch in the South, where she read every chance she got. On the rare occasion that she gained control of the television, she watched Star Trek and imagined living in the future, on distant planets, or at least in a town big enough to have a stop light.

She currently lives in North Carolina, where she is working on her next series, The Delphi Project. If you see her on social media, please tell her to get back into the writing cave.

For updates, check her website: www.rysa.com.

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