A Replacement for "The Replacement"

Sometimes you come across a book so uninteresting and so blah that reviewing them seems like a task instead of a hobby. I am sorry to say that "The Replacement" by Brenna Yovanoff is one of those books. From the tenth page and onwards I kept losing interest and by the time I had actually finished it, I wasn't sure that I could have made it another ten pages. 
What is so frustrating is that the plot idea is really good - the story line could work really well - but in the end it (as so many other books) is dragged down by a cast of cardboard, 2D characters! 


On amazon.co.uk the product description is this: 
Mackie Doyle is a replacement - a fairy child left in the crib of a human baby sixteen years ago, to replace the baby when it was stolen away by the fey. So though he lives in the small town of Gentry, Mackie's real home is the fey world of tunnels and black, murky water, a world of living dead girls ruled by a little tattooed princess. Now, because his fey blood gives him fatal allergies to iron, blood and consecrated ground, Mackie is slowly dying in the human world. Mackie would give anything just to be normal, to live quietly amongst humans, practice his bass guitar and spend time with his crush, Tate. But when Tate's baby sister goes missing, Mackie is drawn irrevocably back home to the fey underworld of Gentry, known as Mayhem, where he must face down the dark creatures, rescue the child, and find his rightful place - in our world, or theirs.


Mackie as a character is quite boring and quite self-obsessed, he never seems to sit down and think about things from Tate's perspective or from Alice's or from his sister Emma's. After a while that becomes really annoying. Tate is not much better, she seems to be there merely to fill up a gap in the plot and only acquires an actual personality when fighting... 
As for the relationship between Mackie and Tate... oh dear. They make Bella and Edward Cullen seem like the perfect, normal, happy couple. All they ever do is fight and make-out - when Mackie is not busy chasing after other, more cheerleader-ish girls. 


So if you are considering reading "The Replacement", I suggest you think again - you can spend you time better, there are so many other good books out there! However, if you are very very keen to read about fey and faery creatures living inside a hill why not try "The Elfin Hill" by H.C. Andersen? 
A beautiful haunting classic - allow me to finish with this quote from the fairytale:


Then the elfin girls had to dance, first in the usual way, and then with stamping feet, which they performed very well; then followed the artistic and solo dance. Dear me, how they did throw their legs about! No one could tell where the dance begun, or where it ended, nor indeed which were legs and which were arms, for they were all flying about together, like the shavings in a saw-pit! And then they spun round so quickly that the death-horse and the grave-pig became sick and giddy, and were obliged to leave the table.