Nihar+P.

Heir Apparent By: Vivian Vande Velde Review By: Nihar Phadke

Heir Apparent by Vivian Vande Velde is a monotonous book that just isn’t worth reading. The writing made me develop a strong disliking for this book right from the beginning. This book is written from the perspective of Giannine Bellisario, a regular 14-year-old girl. She goes to a Rasmussem Gaming Center to play a video game. The games at Rasmussem aren’t regular video games. They put you in a different world and have you play as one of the characters. Giannine chooses “Heir Apparent” because it appears as an interesting game. In the game, she plays as a princess who has been chosen as the heir to the throne by her father, King Cynric. By this time, Cynric has died. She faces the many challenges of running a kingdom. In the game, she has to trust certain people who will help her reach the end of the game. While she is playing, though, some persons come to the Rasmussem Gaming Center and destroy some of the gaming equipment there. As a result, she is forced to beat the game within a certain time limit. If she does not, she will die in the real world. From that point on, she is pressed for time and is forced to play quickly. She makes sure to be nice to everyone she meets in the game so that they don’t attempt to assassinate her. However, she dies in every chapter in the first half of this book. Later on, she realizes that she needs to play smarter. Every time she dies, she starts at the same spot in the game. She gets very irritated because of it. I hate the fact that she constantly gets killed because it just makes the book unnecessarily long and boring. Every time she died, it was very annoying to read her do the same things over and over again. However, she makes sure not to make the same mistakes as she did in the previous life, but she ends up getting killed in some other way. The characters in this book seem dull because they aren’t described in an interesting way. I couldn’t relate to a single one of the characters. The setting was the only thing I liked about this book. She lives in a castle, which was fascinating to read about. However, everything else in this book was so bad that it made the setting look ordinary. The author uses such boring and old language. Half of the sentences in this book are grammatically incorrect. Here is the weird thing: the author does it on purpose! See, in most books, this is supposed to make the book look better, but that is not the case with this book. If I weren’t forced to read this book, I would have abandoned it at the very beginning. I mean, who really cares about a girl who takes on the responsibility of a king? In conclusion, this book was the worst I have ever read. I would rather choose any other book. Unlike this book, those books will actually draw you in and keep you entertained. This book definitely gave me a bad impression of Vande Velde’s books. It was a waste of time for me, and it will be for you, too. Trust me.

I give this book a rating of zero stars.

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