Book Review: The Silver Swan by Amo Jones

The Silver Swan by Amo Jones
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What in hell did I just read and why is it that all the twisted screwed-up-ness of it wowed the kittens out of me?

Amo Jones’ The Elite Kings Club series rides the razor’s edge of Horror, Thriller, and Dark Romance genres. It’s a mindfuck of epic proportions and the tension and terror of more than a few parts required Ativan to read through–this is meant as a compliment.

Notorious and spoiled Madison Montgomery is escaping one nightmare via being introduced to another. She is already suffering a hangover from her mother’s recent tragic murder/suicide. Now Madi’s father has collected a new trophy wife, complete with delinquent son, with which to gift his traumatized little girl. Her new home is overrun by her new prep school’s ‘Ol’ Boy’s Club: a veritable army of hot as sin douche canoes who alternately protect and terrorize her.

There are a lot of things wrong with this book outside the very dark and abusive element. The writing is often atrocious with tense switching, sentence structure breakdowns, and typos. But the real failing is the inconsistency in the time table and the location handling.

We East Coast people cannot swim in a lake during Halloween unless we are having a hot spell straight out of hell. Halloween is also not the time of year for fireflies, we tend to stop seeing them when it’s frosting out. The Hamptons, while being the supposed location of Madison and the Kings, often feels straight from the lifestyle of Southern California and nothing could be further apart in customs and culture than old money families, and starlet beach life.

Further troubling is the messy managing of the timeline that begins the first day of school, followed by the weekend after she first meets the Kings, a few more days in school, and suddenly it’s Halloween. It’s a planner’s nightmare of calendar failures.

Okay then, why the high rating?

The story itself is fascinating. The characters are figures fashioned straight out of folk legend, news headlines, America’s Most Wanted, and the-guilty-pleasure-bad-boy-daydreaming-of -the-mentally-ill.
I’m ill.
I am okay with my sickness.
And admitting you are twisted is the first step in denying that part of you exists.

I could barely put the book down despite it making my heart pound and palms sweat. The distortion of relationships: friends who are foes, foes who are allies, leaves the reader unsure who to trust. Least of all trustworthy is the heroine who can’t help herself from being lead down the proverbial drain. I knew she was pissing me off, doing dumb things that made me want to smack her, but I couldn’t look away from the train wreck she was with her nemesis/love interest/torturer.
Bishop Vincent Hayes is a degenerate blackhole where good girls go to die.

That said, I was a mess reading Silver Swan. I was flipping pages wondering what in the world Madison was thinking while doing the nonsense she was doing. I was also wondering what in the world I was thinking making excuses for this broken Cinderella. All the absurdity of who she was becoming as the story developed made sense to me. I got why she always made the wrong choice. Madison Montgomery is tragically broken to start with and each time she is further shattered it is shaping her into this more fragile glass punching bag begging for crueler punishments.

And I make no excuses for bullying and torture except to say that Amo Jones makes it sound so beautifully reformative.

By the way Bishop Vincent Hayes isn’t the only blackhole in the Elite Kings Club Universe. They are all blackholes in a cosmic clusterfuck of lunacy.